You need to read Robert Novak’s column about Tom DeLay’s memoir set to be released March 20, 2007, and make sure you are in a good mood when you read it. What Novak reveals about DeLay’s attacks against Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and President Bush would be comical if DeLay wasn’t such a pompous hypocrite.

WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich’s attempted phoenix-like rise from his own political ashes to a presidential candidacy next week will run into a harsh assessment by his former House Republican colleague, Tom DeLay. The former majority leader’s memoir assails Gingrich as an “ineffective” House speaker with a flawed moral compass.

Gingrich is not the only erstwhile political ally to feel DeLay’s wrath. In “No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight,” DeLay is even more critical of his predecessor as majority leader, Dick Armey, and assails George W. Bush for being more compassionate than conservative. Even DeLay’s handpicked speaker succeeding Gingrich, J. Dennis Hastert, is accused along with Gingrich and Armey of opening the door to the Democratic purge of him.

DeLay refers to Armey as “so blinded by ambition as to be useless to the cause,” a “poor leader” who had “few fresh ideas.” He adds that Armey “resented anyone he thought might get in the way of his becoming speaker of the House. Beware the man drunk with ambition.” His version of the failed 1997 coup attempt against Gingrich pleads innocence and accuses Armey, after realizing he would not succeed Gingrich, of telling the speaker that DeLay was plotting against him: “He had lied to cover his ambitions, betraying both his movement and his fellow leaders.”

The memoir ends DeLay’s reticence in criticizing President Bush. Deriding Bush’s self-identification as “a compassionate conservative,” DeLay asserts “he has expanded government to suit his purpose, especially in the area of education. He may be compassionate, but he is certainly no conservative in the classic sense.” He also charges that Bush has failed to stress the role of the U.S. troops fighting in Iraq, adding, “typically . . . no one at the White House was listening” to his advice.

Tom DeLay may like to act like he is a bona fide voice for the conservative movement, and he may want to act like a whiny baby and blame everyone else in leadership for not being conservative enough and being corrupted with power, but everyone who knows anything about the House under DeLay’s majority leadership knows that he is full of it. This is the same man who claimed that there was “no fat left to cut in the federal budget,” and who strong-armed legislators into supporting the government-expanding Medicare Part D while holding the vote open in the wee hours of the morning.

Mr. DeLay, I’ll tell you what I told Mrs. Clinton (or is it Ms. Rodham?) in my earlier post: just sit down and shut up. We’re all tired of the bull.

Franklin Pierce College and WBZ-TV New Hampshire telephone survey March 7-12. (link)

H/T: Redstate

Interesting things to note

Rudy dropped 8 pts, Mitt picked up 5, McCain gained 1 from the last poll.

Thompson’s commentary on Gandhi

Here:

Meanwhile, former Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC)are not necessarily among the Republican leaders (rumored to include Bob Dole) who have been urging Fred Thompson to seek the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. But both have reacted to the interview with Chris Wallace last Sunday in which Sen. Thompson said that he’s considering it.

Says Watts, “I define Fred Thompson as AC, what’s AC? All class. He’s a great guy and understands how intense and important this war is.”

Graham- interestingly, a supporter of potential rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz)- said of Thompson, “I think he makes a great president in the movies and he might make a great one in real life.”

4:40PM DOMINATION OF VANDY BEGINS!!!

First there was this whole “Plame Affair,” now we have the “corruption” of the U.S. Department of Justice because 8 out of 93 U.S. Attorneys were fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It never ceases to amaze me how adament the media is in attempting to turn even the slightest typical operation of government into a Watergate-like scandal for the Bush Administration.

U.S. Attorneys are political appointees who serve at the President’s pleasure and should probably be carrying out justice in accordance with the Administration’s goals.  So the following firings, noted in the Wall Street Journal, shouldn’t surprise anyone:

Take sacked U.S. Attorney John McKay from Washington state. In 2004, the Governor’s race was decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire by 129 votes on a third recount. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other media outlets reported, some of the “voters” were deceased, others were registered in storage-rental facilities, and still others were convicted felons. More than 100 ballots were “discovered” in a Seattle warehouse. None of this constitutes proof that the election was stolen. But it should have been enough to prompt Mr. McKay, a Democrat, to investigate, something he declined to do, apparently on grounds that he had better things to do.

In New Mexico, another state in which recent elections have been decided by razor thin margins, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias did establish a voter fraud task force in 2004. But it lasted all of 10 weeks before closing its doors, despite evidence of irregularities by the likes of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn. As our John Fund reported at the time, Acorn’s director Matt Henderson refused to answer questions in court about whether his group had illegally made copies of voter registration cards in the run-up to the 2004 election.

As for some of the other fired Attorneys, at least one of their dismissals seemed to owe to differences with the Administration about the death penalty, another to questions about the Attorney’s managerial skills. Not surprisingly, the dismissed Attorneys are insisting their dismissals were unfair, and perhaps in some cases they were. It would not be the first time in history that a dismissed employee did not take kindly to his firing, nor would it be the first in which an employer sacked the wrong person. 

Oh, and all the Democrats clamoring for Gonzales’s head on a platter?  They may want to recall the actions of the Clinton Administration to fire all 93 U.S. Attorneys (from the same WSJ article):

As everyone once knew but has tried to forget, Mr. Hubbell was a former partner of Mrs. Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock who later went to jail for mail fraud and tax evasion. He was also Bill and Hillary Clinton’s choice as Associate Attorney General in the Justice Department when Janet Reno, his nominal superior, simultaneously fired all 93 U.S. Attorneys in March 1993. Ms. Reno–or Mr. Hubbell–gave them 10 days to move out of their offices.

At the time, President Clinton presented the move as something perfectly ordinary: “All those people are routinely replaced,” he told reporters, “and I have not done anything differently.” In fact, the dismissals were unprecedented: Previous Presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, had both retained holdovers from the previous Administration and only replaced them gradually as their tenures expired. This allowed continuity of leadership within the U.S. Attorney offices during the transition.

Equally extraordinary were the politics at play in the firings. At the time, Jay Stephens, then U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, was investigating then Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and was “within 30 days” of making a decision on an indictment. Mr. Rostenkowski, who was shepherding the Clinton’s economic program through Congress, eventually went to jail on mail fraud charges and was later pardoned by Mr. Clinton.

Also at the time, allegations concerning some of the Clintons’ Whitewater dealings were coming to a head. By dismissing all 93 U.S. Attorneys at once, the Clintons conveniently cleared the decks to appoint “Friend of Bill” Paula Casey as the U.S. Attorney for Little Rock. Ms. Casey never did bring any big Whitewater indictments, and she rejected information from another FOB, David Hale, on the business practices of the Arkansas elite including Mr. Clinton. When it comes to “politicizing” Justice, in short, the Bush White House is full of amateurs compared to the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton, sit down and shut up.

The tragedy of this story is that we have an irresponsible media corps who are blindly scrambling to conclude that the Bush Administration is corrupt before considering the true merits of any story.  Likewise, the tragedy is also that the Administration is willing to roll over to the media.  Alberto Gonzales had nothing to apologize for, and President Bush didn’t have to express such dismay while in Mexico about the firings.  Give me a break guys.  Stand up for legitimate, routine government actions and go on the attack.  Point out what previous administrations have done (notably Clinton) and explain to the American people the circumstances here.  I don’t have much sympathy for you if you’re just going to let the media paint you as corrupt without offering a true defense.