Good Riddance

DeLay's out. After the hijinks of the past year, since Bugchaser's habitual mal-fee-ance had become more widely publicized, this is almost anticlimactic.

In an interview Monday with Time magazine, DeLay -- facing both criminal charges and the political fallout from his close association with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- said that even though he still believed he could win re-election, he is a "realist" and did not want to risk losing the seat to a Democratic challenger.

"This had become a referendum on me," DeLay told Time. "So it's better for me to step aside and let it be a referendum on ideas, Republican values and what's important for the district."

Please. Elections are all about risk, and they're always a referendum on the incumbent. He knows he'd lose, and lose badly.

And what exactly are these "ideas" and "Republican values" Bugman cares so deeply for anyway? Money laundering? Fraud? Influence peddling? Free golf trips to Scotland? Illegally gerrymandering districts? Bullying and intimidating colleagues to push lousy legislation through with a minimum amount of debate? Yeah, that's the party of "ideas" and "values", all right. What a class act.

His successor as majority leader, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, issued a statement Monday night calling DeLay "one of the most effective and gifted leaders the Republican Party has ever known."

"He has served our nation with integrity and honor, and I'm honored to call him my colleague and friend," Boehner said.

Good, you're next, Boner. Maybe you can eventually call him your cellmate as well, and you two can try in vain to keep from getting your asses sold to the Aryan Brotherhood for a carton of smokes.

While DeLay has not been linked to wrongdoing in the Abramoff probe, two of his former staffers -- Tony Rudy and Michael Scanlon -- have pleaded guilty to corruption charges.

Rudy, DeLay's former deputy chief of staff and press secretary, entered a guilty plea Friday to a fraud conspiracy charge, in which Scanlon and Abramoff were named as co-conspirators. Prosecutors said Rudy took cash, trips and gifts from Abramoff and tried to improperly influence members of Congress after he left DeLay's staff in 2000 to become a lobbyist.

And that's why the Bugman pulled out now rather than later, and that's why he's staying in Virginia -- on the off chance he beats the rap, he'll stay and become just another lobbyist, the shit that gets squished between the elephant's toes.

This couldn't have happened to a nicer scumbag. This is a man who once infamously explained his absence from Vietnam as a result of minorities taking up all the available slots. (Note that DeLay's spokesman in the Slate article is none other than Abramoff sidekick Mike Scanlon. Recall that it was Scanlon's indiscretions that got everyone busted in the first place -- after he dumped his fiancee, Emily Miller, for a younger woman, Miller dropped a dime on the whole rotten game.)

This is a man who has been comparing his current travails to those of Jesus Christ. I have no idea what sort of Christian would stay in the same room with such a vile person, but perhaps they're just birds of a feather. Truly devout people and politicians are one thing, but pols who hypocritically and opportunistically invoke Jesus are the lowest of the low, and the publicly pious who stick with them need to read their good book a little more closely, because Jesus would never have had anything to do with a sickening lowlife like Tom DeLay.

Here's hoping you get everything that's coming to you, asshole.