Tom Delay is trying really, really, reeaaally hard to spin his decision to resign from the House and withdraw from a re-election bid as an altruistic gesture toward the Republican Party. He says he doesn’t want the 2006 mid-term elections to be about him, as if taking himself out of the picture is going to remove him as the “poster boy” for a Republican culture of corruption.
Not so fast there, Hammer. A rapid flip flop after winning a primary election while insisting you would fight the charges against you, only serves to remind everyone that combative denials and smiling photo ops intended to mask concern about mounting evidence of corruption are not evidence of innocence!
In the face of more and more potential testimony against him, as the lower level rats try to save themselves by giving up the bigger rats, Delay decided to cut and run rather than continue to publicly fight the charges. His sudden decision to try to slink into anonymity are a constant reminder that the other prominent Republicans who are loudly proclaiming their innocence – Ney, Doolittle, Burns, Frist, et al. – are also likely doing so, not with the idea that they can actually prove their innocence, but in the hope that they can ride out the storm without being proven guilty!
With his sudden about face, Delay’s face – so proudly smiling in his mugshot – is the perfect reminder to everyone that the force of the denial is quite often an indicator of the force of the potential evidence against those accused of corruption. After all, when you are a crook, why not profess loudly and forcefully that you are not a crook?
Instead of fading into the background and letting other Republicans retain the power that he and his cronies built, Delay has become the poster boy not just of a culture of corruption, but of a culture of corruption whose members will publicly say anything to avoid having to admit guilt – until it becomes inevitable! Then, they run away and hide so they can live out their lives in a world of denial, hoping they will be forgotten.
Well, that’s not going to happen to Tom Delay, as long as I can make up my own posters!
My understanding is that the timing of his withdrawal from the race somehow makes it legal for The Hammer to use the money in his re-election campaign fund to pay legal fees. He basically had 1.3 million reasons to withdraw when he did (and he'll likely need every penney!).
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