When disgraced GOPers won't go away

Okay, what the fuck is Tom DeLay doing still hanging around Washington, DC? He left Congress in disgrace. He embarassed his party. He all but guaranteed that a Democrat would take his seat because he resigned after winning the primary, and the GOP couldn't get him off the ballot. You'd think that he would be scared to show his face among his former partners in crime (pun intended). But no. As The New Yorker checks in on Washington's own Dark Lords of the Sith, it seems Tom DeLay still has friends on Capitol Hill.

The Schiavo case was one of my proudest moments in Congress,” Tom DeLay told me not long ago in the basement grill room of the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican retreat, where congressmen and senators can mix with lobbyists, a number of whom are former congressmen. DeLay was tan and smiling and tranquil, which was striking, considering that he is currently under indictment in Texas on money-laundering charges, and that many Republicans blame him for allowing a culture of corruption to thrive when he led the Republican caucus.

Not that those Republicans were terribly vocal about said culture of corruption when Tommy Boy was majority leader.

Oooooooh, but here it gets good! What are Tommy Boy's plans now? Besides pretending that reality is something other than what it really is? Well, let's listen...

DeLay says that when, in the coming years, he is not fighting the indictment in Texas (he insists that he is not guilty) he will be building a conservative grass-roots equivalent of MoveOn.org. “God has spoken to me,” he said. “I listen to God, and what I’ve heard is that I’m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party, and I think we shouldn’t be underestimated.”

See? I told you he's living in his own universe! Tommy, if God ever spoke to you, I'm sure the first thing he'd say would be, "Do America a favor. Get out of politics and stay out."

However, I'm eager to see this right-wing version of MoveOn.org that he's so eager about. Will he be running this little grassroots operation from his prison cell when he isn't busy scrubbing the floors of prison bathrooms?

Occasionally, I'll hop over to Amazon to read the reviews of that book of his--what's it called again? I Retreated and Surrendered? Yeah, that's it. The reviews are divided between the one-star pans ("Tom DeLay is a disgrace and he probably didn't really write this book, anyway.") to the gushing five-star raves ("Tom DeLay 4 PREZIDENT!!1!1!"). But the saddest cases are the people who sign their real, given names to their five-star reviews. Seriously, what kind of sad individual would publicly reveal him/herself to be a DeLay cheerleader? Isn't that kind of like picking your nose at a black tie dinner or farting in a crowded elevator? Are these people really so clueless and/or ignorant? Who knows? It's funny to read, that's all I'll say.