Who Would’ve Thunk It?
I’ll take “Just What Rick Perry Needed” for $500, Alex.
Tom DeLay is urging recently indicted Gov. Rick Perry to convene a special session to consider prosecutorial misconduct, with a particular focus on the Travis County District Attorney’s Public Integrity Unit.
Oh yeah, bring convicted felon Tom DeLay and moral midget to the table to help Rick Perry. Perry doesn’t call a special session on the nonexistent border crisis or on the very real crisis in children’s health care. But, yeah, let’s wage a vendetta!
DeLay is insisting that all manner of cahooting is going on.
“He’s already made this political. He’s twisted the bribery law to fit the prosecution he wanted,” DeLay said of Michael McCrum, a San Antonio-based lawyer named to prosecute the case by Republican-appointed District Judge Bert Richardson. “This was started by Rosemary Lehmberg. And she used the system. Yes, she made it look good because she recused herself, but she set it up. She is very much a part of it.”
First off, why do they keep saying bribery? Rick Perry as not charged with bribery. Should we look into that? Are Rick and Tom sending us coded messages? Is Rick hooked on pain killers and is Tom drinking again? Will Rick marry Tom and take over the Republican party? Tune in tomorrow for more Days of Our Delusions.
Second off, Rosemary Lehmberg had nothing to do with this. Nada. Nilch. No witchcraft involved. She didn’t appoint the special prosecutor, name the grand jury, or select the judge, so how the hell did she “set it up.” Did she use those magical powers only obtained through years of law school and the Texas heat?
Y’all, if Perry’s indictment brought Tom Damn DeLay back to the surface to lecture us all on morality, then I’m a happy woman.
This is the kind of thing that is said when the speaker is absolutely sure his audience will accept his/her version of the story. Facts are unimportant; feels is everything.
1It’s been a Republican mantra since Reagan, on so many topics from WMDs to climate change: “Reality is whatever we say it is, so stop giving us facts.”
2Is Tom Delay wearing falsies under that vest?
3In order to help Perry and Delay get the charges straight, we might have to shorten them to one word each: abuse and coercion. Admittedly, these are complicated concepts, but using them as song lyrics might help. (tune of Frere Jacques)
4I abused my
official capacity
And coerced, and coerced,
A public official, a public official.
Bribery, Bribery.
When they’ve got it down, they can do it in a 2 part round.
There is a disturbing trend among so-called Democrats throughout the blogosphere and it’s now becoming hardened into “conventional wisdom” which means that, pretty soon, you’ll have all the bobble-heads concern-trolling over it on the TV machine.
To wit: this is a “bad” prosecution that will somehow hurt Democrats.
If I’ve read one article over the past several days, I’ve read a dozen supposed Democrats and, of course, “centrists” who think that the case against him is weak, that the prosecution is “political,” and that it will boomerang against Democratic chances in the fall.
I believe that most, if not all, of this weak sauce stems from two basic issues.
The first is the perception of Texans for Public Justice (TPJ) as a bunch of wild-eyed communist vigilante accountants, whose insistence that Republicans be held accountable for violations of law is somehow seen as a partisan witchhunt. This in a state where convicted felon Tom Delay walks free, instead of using soap on a rope in a prison shower, because a Republican judge set him free. In a state where every dirty Republican can find a friendly hunting or fishing buddy on a convenient Bench. In a state where corrupt Republicans infesting public office at every level and in every branch routinely, perversely and publicly flout the laws and Constitution they’ve sworn.
Yeah, in Texas, prosecuting corruption can be nothing BUT partisan.
But even worse than tarring this prosecution with the brush of TPJ, is the Claudette Colvin effect.
Claudette Colvin was Rosa Parks 9 months before Rosa Parks became ROSA PARKS! She was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to move to the black section of a bus. Why then are we canonizing Rosa Parks instead of Claudette Colvin? Why was she passed over by black leadership as the face of segregation?
Because she was an unwed, pregnant teenager.
I think Rosemary Lehmberg is facing the same denigration from the people who should be supporting her most vehemently, because she made a complete and utter drunk fool of herself, got convicted, went to jail, apologized to constituents, promised to seek help, and promised also not to run for re-election.
Yeah, not the poster child for MADD, but that doesn’t give Rick Perry the right to demand her job on a platter, or else….!
Well, she rightfully told him to stick that where the sun doesn’t shine, and he carried out his blackmail threat and… here we are. Who CARES what Lehmberg did? She PAID her debt. Whetehr she keeps her job is between her and the citizens of Travis County.
But the weak-kneed, lily-livered, yellow-bellied “center left” as they call themselves, RUN from this woman as if she’s Charlie Manson in a skirt, and fall all over themselves to apologize to the REAL crook, who is finally getting tripped up because he did in public what he’s been doing in private for decades.
And if, in the end, it does rebound against efforts to turn Texas blue, it won’t be because this was the wrong battle to fight. It will be because true Democrats have been stabbed in the back by their so-called friends, and a lazy, LAZY media.
5@Miz JJ:
6To answer yore questions in order:
Gov pRick bribed somebody.
YES!!!!
Probably.
Maybe and He never stopped.
Probably and they will try.
Probably and Yes.
daChipster says: Truth.
7Tom made a Freudian slip in public. As I said before, these indictments are just the tip of the iceberg. There will be a lot more bats flying out of the cave as soon as it is flooded with light.
8Obviously, she “set it up” by allowing Perry to threaten her.
92 wingnut judges set Delay free.
10It’s the heat, I tell you.
11maggie: I believe you are right. This is the thread that, if you pull it, it unravels everything else. As soon as subpoenas and depositions and plea deals get done, suddenly you will find a Republican who suddenly found he had a conscience and is coming forward for the public good and invoking the ainted memories of George Washington, Sam Houston and John Bell Hood will spill his guts.
That’s another beef I have with the naysayers who pooh-pooh this indictment: it wasn’t the tip of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. It wasn’t a fifth-rate burglary that sank Nixon. It wasn’t a traffic jam that’s gonna sink Christie.
It’s that all these things act like they are unsinkable, followed by the predictable denouement.
I was reading a column by a Dem naysayer yesterday who was saying, “well, Johnson in 1929 did…”
Lyndon Dead President Johnson… EIGHTY FIVE YEARS AGO?
85 years ago, forsooth!
12Only two things would survive a nuclear war: cockroaches…and Tom DeLay.
13Monty, on the bright side, the cockroaches would be desperate for food after a nuclear war. DeLay, “I’m the last man standing. Aw shi………..”
14Delay would convince the roaches he’s one of them and always has been.
15e platypus onion, that is a perfect example of a false dichotomy. Simply because DeLay slid past a couple of Republican judges in Texas is no indication he could outwit a cockroach.
16What did you do,PKM? Remind them cockroaches that Delay used to be an exterminator? Kinda poisoned the well for me,is that it? I’m telling you roaches can be bought and Delay is just the one to bought them!
17e platypus onion, two legged Republican roaches are for sale to the lowest of low life bidders. Real cockroaches have major integrity in comparison.
Point of honor, EPO, I’m talking cockroaches, while pRick is beholden to Koch-roaches.
Meanwhile, psychopath pRick ‘evolves’ from exterminating cockroaches to his Perry-tale pathology of running down the Rio Grande taking aim at little children. Governor Corn Dog is a real wannabee bad butt gunboat goober.
National prospects? Nah. Not even a boatload of Koch cash can remove his warts.
18Rick Perry and Hot Tub Tom need to take a slow soak together.
Coercion and extortion are two sides of the same coin.
19Maggie and DaMasterChipster, as the Shamwow unravels, I suspect we are gonna see a lot of suddenly diagnosed brain tumors and Not-so-Early onset Alzheimers….Rovian Playbook rule 2,654
20The question about the word “bribery” came from Rick Perry himself. At a New Hampshire political meeting last week he actually said he had been indicted for Bribery, that he didn’t understand the “lawyering on it, but he will not be convicted and it will be thrown out.
Why the national press did not pick up on this is questionable. Salon.com had it.
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