As Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz prepare to leave their respective venues for assaulting American values and human decency, they will be joining a large and very recent list of crooks, despots and opportunists who for too long reaped power and riches while making a mockery of the Constitution and the American legal system. Perhaps the man who laid the blueprint for this type of grand scale violation is the former House representative from Sugar Land, Texas, Tom DeLay, who has spent his time, since stepping down from Congress in April, 2006, and awaiting trial on violation of campaign finance laws, writing his recently released life story, “No Retreat, No Surrender.”
Ostensibly a memoir of his life and career in politics, this utterly fascinating book is really a 180-page Power Point presentation detailing why Tom DeLay - who follows the rubric of all megalomaniacs by frequently referring to himself in the third person - is a man of complete integrity and Godly virtue whose tireless work on behalf of the American people has led him to be a victim of media manipulation and liberal slander. But, as we all know, just as the lead couple in Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical film, “The Sugarland Express”, lead a line of highway patrol cars, reporters and curious onlookers, while holding a patrolman hostage, down the Texas highways to where their little boy resides with a foster family, so the man from Sugar Land led the entire Republican party and the Bush Administration on a pilgrimage, while holding their reputations hostage, to his own pride and joy of power over Washington. Indeed, the former chief exterminator of Redwood Chemical, who knew no bug he could not spray into oblivion - and whose loathing for the “Socialist-dominated” Environmental Protection Agency that tried to restrict how many pesticides he wanted to pour into the atmosphere led him to the political career that has become the stuff of legend - has never met a grandiose illusion he did not choose to harbor.
In line with the computerized slide shows that surely accompanied most strategy meetings led by this Beach-Boy-coiffed Chucky look-alike, “No Retreat, No Surrender” is peppered with an astonishingly large number of bullet point lists for such a slender book. Chief among these: the accomplishments he made in “getting government off of people’s backs” during his twenty-two years in Washington - though most of the backs would be the waxed, tanned and massaged ones of the super rich; goals he laid out for bettering the moral fabric of American society - not realizing he would succeed in doing so by making most Americans look moral compared to him; and, most predominately, the lies - or, rather, LIES! - spread about him by the “Socialist”, “hippie”, “Nazi” liberals who kept getting in the way of his desire to serve this country. Of course, as has been much reported by the media that shares mattress space with these LYING socialist Nazis, DeLay does not let his fellow conservatives in the Republican Party off the hook. This is primarily because he regards so many of his fellow Grand Old Partiers as whimps who didn’t have the guts to hound, bully and threaten their Democratic opponents with the same zeal as the man formerly known as The Hammer (who did NOT, as he corrects the reader, earn that nick name due to, his bludgeoning of whimps on both sides of the aisle into quivering submission, but instead acquired it due to his capacity for building trust and keeping the Houses of government firmly nailed together!).
The most prominent girly man Republican to receive poundings from Hardware Tom is George H. W. Bush, whom DeLay sneeringly paints as the very definition of old, accommodating conservatism that predominated during the years under Richard Nixon (about whom the author reveals some Nixonian paranoia of his own, due to his repeated references to Dick as nothing more than a Socialist in conservative drag!). Young George gets a better ride from the human bullwhip, especially in regards to his “strong, steady” handling of the war on terror and his “sincere dedication to the word of God.” Still, thanks to the No Child Left Behind act and his “excessive spending on social programs” (huh?) the Current Occupant is, in the Twilight-Zone-view of the author, “compassionate, but no conservative.” Former Republican minority leader Bob Michel, who served from the time DeLay entered the House in 1984 until Michel’s retirement in 1994, is also a favorite whipping boy, thanks to his “go along to get along” approach that made him seem “content with the crumbs at the Democrats’ table.” Even a renowned figure like Newt Gingrich, whom DeLay initially admired for chomping at the heels of Democrats when he was minority whip, goes in for some serious pounding over his later tenure as Speaker of the House. To DeLay’s vinegar-laced eyes, Newt became too enamored of his start status and, worse, too cozy with their arch enemy President Clinton. Consequently, The Newt made too many concessions to Super Bill after the government shutdown of 1995-1996, especially in regards to Gingrich’s and DeLay’s Contract On - eh, With - America.
Though he may not admit it, Tom DeLay has at least one four-star whimp in the G.O.P. to thank for his success. I think the author explains it best with this Freudian slip: “It was Harry Truman who once quipped in a moment of frustration, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’ I was fortunate to have a friend in Washington named Dennis Hastert.” Indeed, Shaggy Dog Denny - who looks like a giant bearded collie in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses - served ably as the sham “Speaker of the House” for seven years while having his leash pulled by his pint-sized master. In turn, by working behind the scenes while Hastert stumbled and bumbled for the House and the cameras, Terrier Tom knew he could more easily threaten his opponents, reward his friends and enact schemes for screwing the country if he were not having his every move monitored by the LYING, Socialist, Nazi, hippie and - based on the derogatory references to gays he makes in defending Hastert’s looking the other way while Representative Mark Foley pursued underaged male pages - unabashedly fruity liberal media.
But the Democrats, and the news media outside of the Green Zone of FOX that obligingly helps spread their “LIES!”, go in for most of the abuse in Tom Thumb’s Power Point show. Anybody who can’t guess who the number one representative of left-wing immorality and pelvic-thrusting Godlessness has been living in a cave for the past twenty years. According to the author, Bill Clinton isn’t just a liberal, but a particular kind of liberal whose every political move, diplomatic move - in fact, every move, period - was simply “un-American”. The Clintonian atrocities that DeLay lists ... in bullet point ... deal less with specific policies that the President pursued or enacted, than with the lack of respect he gave off like a bad smell. Clinton disrespected the military. Clinton disrespected the Secret Service. Clinton disrespected Congress. He even disrespected the executive offices of the White House, which, according to conservative legend, the Clinton staff trashed like so many Blutos just before the Bushies moved in. And worst of all, Clinton disrespected The Hammer’s beloved game of golf!
It is no surprise, then, that the mad putter zealously supported the impeachment of Clinton over lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In doing so, he falls in lock step with the hypocrites in his party on the issue of personal morality - though, I guess, DeLay could argue that he at least confined his infidelities to the years he spent in the Texas legislature, before he was first elected to Congress and before Dr. James Dobson’s “Where is Daddy?” video inspired him to give up life as Hot Tub Tom and pursue his calling as The Hammer of God. That DeLay devoted his life to Jesus Christ merely to have some wiggle room with the Christian right is among the “Ten Liberal Lies You’ve Heard About Me” that he addresses in the second-to-last chapter. Among the other scurrilous falsehoods he takes aim at include his taking of illegal trips paid for by lobbyists and corporations - golf-saturated trips which the author says he had to charge to those he rewarded with political favors, so he could save the taxpayers that expense!.
Another LIE we heard about himself was his incredibly perverse blocking of civil rights progress in the Mariana Islands by DeLay, so he and fallen super lobbyist Jack Abramoff could reap the profits off of sweat shop and sex shop labor by Chinese “guest workers.” All of this Father Tom tosses off as malarky. During his now infamous visit to the islands in 1997 he claims to have found no sex industry whatsoever coursing through the territory (though one woman he talked with admitted to having to work as a stripper back in China) and the factories where the Chinese seamstresses toiled for a dollar day - and who were forced to get abortions or face deportation - were as pleasant as any air conditioned shopping mall (though, he admits that some of the paint was peeling). As for the now-incarcerated Jack Abramoff - who, hopefully, is being forced to either toil in his prison’s sweat shop, or bump and grind as a stripper for his cell mates - DeLay insists that his relationship was neither close nor based on financial affairs, but merely a casual, advisory association that was completely above board. “I also liked him ...” proclaims the author, “because he is an Orthodox Jew, and I have a deep love for the Jewish people.” Especially if they act like Nazis!
The final LIE spread by the Liberal Media Reich - this one in regards to DeLay’s reasons for leaving office and bowing out of his reelection campaign after winning the Republican primary in 2006 - ties in well with the book’s hilariously ironic title. First, there was Tom’s brave decision to “Retreat” from his post by resigning in June of that year, an act he was compelled to take after “several days of prayer” because of what he refers to as “the internal party rule preventing an indicted congressman from serving in leadership” - a rule which the author snidely notes that the vice-loving Democrats didn’t have (probably because the relatively smaller number of slime balls in the Dems’ ranks doesn’t require them to have such a rule!). Then there is the courageous “Surrender” of his name from the ballot so he would not “be a burden around the necks of other Republican candidates in the country, who likely to have the lies about Tom DeLay lobbed at them during the heat of a campaign.” Alas, state election rules prevented him from removing his most redolent moniker, and he would become enough of a burden to cause the write-in candidate for the party to lose in 2006. This last happenstance also provided some delicious irony, being a slap in the face of DeLay’s fervent redistricting of Texas congressional lines during his last years in office, in order to up the election stakes for the GOP.
Even after this sniveling defense of his last moves in political life, the author goes on to contradict himself by snarling that the Republicans lost Congress in 2006 because of his very absence as a bold, ballsy visionary. After so many magnificent victories during his and the party’s time in power - including, yes, the Iraq War, which G.I. Tom regards as being brilliantly handled by the “wise” and “courageous” Donald Rumsfeld whom “the country was lucky to have in office” - the Republicans failed to paint a grand, mobilizing picture for the American people in the style of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But DeLay reassures those weirdos who still get off on the party’s thirty-year dismantling of all the social programs put forth by FDR that the past election did not in any way signify a philosophical shift in the American people. Indeed: “Liberal ideas are dying. What you hear is the death rattle of an outworn and misguided world view.”
This would be news not only to those who voted the Democrats back into power, but to most operatives in the GOP, who are uniformly pessimistic about their chances of keeping the Presidency or taking back Congress in 2008. The fact is, the mercenary, consequence-denying brand of conservatism introduced by DeLay’s biggest hero, Ronald Reagan, and carried on by The Hammer and most of those on the right who’ve coursed through Congress since, is watching its own rattle become fossilized. As a result, World Bank President and amateur hair stylist (check the opening scenes of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9-11”) Paul Wolfowitz, amateur Attorney General and world class bootlicker Alberto Gonzales, and many others in and around the Bush-Republican pit, have been or will be crushed to pieces like so many dried rattler skins. As for The Man from Sugar Land, he will have to search for less elegant armies of intimidated followers than the Republicans he retreated from and surrendered control of. Luckily, he should be able to put at least one of his talents to use in years to come. Pest control is, no doubt, a serious problem in our penal system.
