DeLay's going DOWN. - Page 2

"The criminal indictment of Majority Leader Tom DeLay is the latest example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption at the expense of the American people," the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said in a statement.

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the indictment was further evidence that "alleged illegal activity reaches to the highest levels of the Republican Party."

Originally posted by addabox
Have any evidence that this a "political attack"?]

Perhaps you can explain how that suggests partisan tendencies on the part of Mr. Earl.

Originally posted by SDW2001
I read the indictment and listened to the pundits. I just don't see how this is going to stick. There is absolutely no evidence presented against Delay in the indictment. All legal pundits I've seen today say the case is thin at best.

All that said, it looks even more dubious when one looks at the prosecutor's history of politcally motivated prosecutions. No reasonable person can question his rabbid partisanship. In May, he went to a democratic fund raiser and talked about Delay personally. He can go to funraisers, but he can't talk about subjects pertaining to ongoing investigations. He could be disabarred for such conduct. Then of course there was his pursuit of Kay Baily Hutchinson...but let's not even go there.

What further makes me think the indictment is bunk is the way Pelosi and Dean jumped on it and tried to expand it to all Republicans. It just smacks of a carefully planned strategy.

Pelosi:


Dean:



(Source: NYT)


Sounds like the opening salvo for the 06 midterms to me.

So, we have a federal probe implicating the president's number one political advisor and the vice president's chief of staff in the violation of laws protecting CIA agents and possibly lying to federal investigators.

We have a multi-pronged investigation into a lobbyist who happens to be a very close associate of Tom DeLay,Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and the entire Republican leadership going back to their youth as members of the College republicans. This lobbyist is now implicated in a mafia murder plot and has been arrested on charges affiliated with that crime.

A member of the Bush administration who is a good friend and associate of all of the above was arrested this week for lying to the Feds about his good friend the lobbyist.

The majority leader of the Senate is now officially under investigation by the SEC and federal prosecutors for insider trading involving potentially many millions of dollars.

The majority leader of the House was just indicted by a Texas Grand jury for violating laws prohibiting the use of corporate money in campaigns.

Fifty-five percent (55%) of Americans say that DeLay is about as ethical as most politicians. Eight percent (8%) say he is more ethical than most, 21% say less ethical. Those numbers are similar to perceptions of Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.

Originally posted by SDW2001
1. When the vast majority of people analyzing it agree it's a ridiculous and basless indictment, you ignore them? I've listened to several lawyers on this, and not one thinks the indictment has merit.

2. True, the man has gone after Democrats as well. That doesn't mean he's not a partisan.

3. I think you should investigate who this guy is before you attribute the response to a Bush sponsored political assasination. Look up his statements last May at the Dem fundraiser. For starters, he said "I'm the guy who is going to get Delay". As I said, this statement might just get him disbarred. Just watch.

And he became even more determined, putting corruption at the core of his philosophy. "Ethics abuse at the top trickles down like acid rain," he wrote in an essay in a Texas criminal-justice journal. "Just as an untended garden keeps on producing weeds, our eroded communities sprout crop after crop of criminals."

Then, in 1993, he indicted his first important Republican, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. It was the typical thing, using state telephones for campaign purposes. But Hutchison had a political consultant named Karl Rove, and soon it was Earle who was in for the fight of his life. Bumper stickers appeared all over Texas denouncing the Earle of Injustice. Republicans began accusing him of everything from conflict of interest to leaking to the press to "Gestapo-like tactics." For weeks they kept up a wave of hostile press releases and telephone calls, even pushing the legal limit by contacting every single member of his grand jury. One Republican called it a "scorched-earth policy."

But it worked. Having stirred up so much publicity, Hutchison claimed there was too much publicity and got the case moved to a Republican district near Fort Worth. When the new judge made an order that would have resulted in Earle having to go through a separate hearing on each piece of evidenceand there were hundreds of pieces of evidencehe lost hope and dropped the case. His friends were puzzled. His enemies crowed: Bizarre! Flaky!

It was the low point of his career.

But that's not going to happen again, he swears, not this time.

Originally posted by midwinter
So what you're saying, addabox, is that the democrats need to run better smear campaigns?

Mark... may I call you Mark? I feel when someone has shown me the insides of their own rectum, we're pretty much on a first name basis... I have some words for you.

Whitewater. Rush Limbaugh. "Drug Dealer" Bill Clinton. Swift Boats.

Vince Fucking Foster.

Playing with fire, you say? Because the indictments ringing Tom DeLay finally reached up that one, final step from his ring of closest advisers to DeLay himself? Because the SEC has launched a formal investigation into the same behaviors by Bill Frist that put Martha Stewart recently in prison? Because one of the single most visible, highest profile Republican money men has been indicted for fraud, is being investigated for client shakedowns, and has his close business associates being investigated for a mob-connected murder?

What utter cowardice. What pathetic anti-American pedantry. What laughable protestation. The crimes of campaign money laundering, of fraud, of conspiracy, the violation of the laws of the nation, to be answered with stern visions of potential gunfire if Democrats have the audacity to pursue it.

This is the world of the Republican Party, split open like a rotting pumpkin. Crime after crime after crime being investigated, all revolving around the Republican money machine. Every seed connected by the strands of money they share between them. Barely-laundered campaign money passed in the palm of every flabby handshake. Every player in boldface, underlined print in the Rolodex of every other.

And still, this same bottom-tier world of flag-waving supporters still obsessed over an extramarital sex act, but offended to the point of sad, blustering threats at the notion that crimes by gilded and worshipped Republicans are really still crimes.


Your party has set aflame the entire political landscape, and now, once burned, you warn sternly from the branches of a burnt-out tree about "playing with fire". You used the ashes of one of the great liberal cities of America, New York City, as war paint for your own sick, racist dreams. You shudder at a burning flag, yet are willing to snip-and-cut basic tenets of the Constitution as needed or convenient.

And now, you're outraged, not by any of the rest of it, not by anything that has come before, but because a few prominent Republican faces have -- shock of shocks -- been indicted in probes that have spanned years of investigation, and interrogation, and deposition. That, you say, represents the underpinnings of a civil war.

You poor, hollow, blood-painted clowns. Cheering the trials and failures of your country with the same pennants and giant foam hands that you wave at your favorite sports teams. Willing to accept the most outrageous of lies, if they are spoken from your favorite talking heads, and soothe your own notions of America for you, and only for you.

And as for the audacity of Democrats speaking up during this process... the redfaced, flatulent fury with which you declare Republicans off-limits to that which you so gleefully hurl yourself...

Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.

I know you hate me, and anyone else who dares disturb the thin strands of alternate reality in which George W. Bush is an intellectual giant, Saddam really was responsible for 9/11, the economy is getting better by the minute, and we capture the most very important members of al Qaeda on a weekly basis.

But here's some advice. You'd better start hating me more. This is the world you forged and, unfortunately for you, I'm beginning to take a fancy for it. Welcome to the politics of your own party, finally sprouting from the ground on which you planted the seeds and shat upon them.

Step back from the edge? You poor boy, asleep in the back of the car the whole trip, finally waking up and wondering where you're at.

Swift boats. Aluminum tubes. Niger uranium. "Mushroom clouds". Whitewater.

Vince Fucking Foster.

You can't even see the edge from here. You left it behind a hundred miles back.

So don't give me chest-thumping crap about civil wars, if your politicians are indicted. Don't give me visions of a lake of fire, if all those who find you loathsome refuse to suck at your teats of scientific ignorance in the name of religion, racism in the name of freedom, and corruption in the name of the New World Order.

Get used to the world you have created, and the stench your worshipped heroes have unleashed.

Tell me, would you be less likely to support the indictment of Delay by AD Earle if you learned that Earle had fathered an illegitimate black child?