Bringing Down The House of Reps.

The early Tom DeLay would have agreed that Washington is a zoo and one shouldn’t get too close to the animals. Abolish the Departments of Education and Energy, rein in the bureaucrats.He would then have traipsed off to an eight-martini evening with lobbyists, lawmakers, and sundry creatures of Washington.In that respect it’s remarkable how little Tom DeLay has changed — how little he needed to — now that he is among the most colorful specimens in the political menagerie.Twenty-two contentious years later, after countless protracted political battles, scandals, the K Street Project, and, finally, trumped-up campaign-finance charges ended his run as Republican congressional enforcer-in-chief, “The Hammer” can be counted on to talk the talk of the Republican revolution but to act with dispatch toward whatever advantage the politics of the moment present.For the GOP, he epitomizes the old saying “a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”His memoir, “No Retreat, No Surrender” (Sentinel, 189 pages, $25.95), is part intellectual defense of the author’s Machiavellian disposition and part airbrushed autobiography. But it is all politics. The very writing of a DeLay memoir is inevitably a political act, with half-truths and helpful omissions.Tom DeLay was born in Laredo, Texas, in 1947, the son of an itinerant farmer, oilman, and alcoholic whose work brought the family to Venezuela for much of Mr. Delay’s youth. His adolescence and young adulthood involved enough carousing and rough-housing to get him booted from Baylor University.He married in 1967, graduated in biology from the University of Houston in 1970 and, prosaically, entered the pest-control business, where “I learned that knowledge is power,” starting with the types and quantities of chemicals to kill bugs. Useful for Washington.Elected to the House in 1984, Mr. DeLay soon drank and womanized his way through Reaganite Washington (“my usual dozen martinis during an evening of revelry” and multiple unspecified infidelities) before a Christian rebirth fostered by Rep. Frank Wolf and James Dobson.The Clinton years were salad days for Mr. DeLay, who scaled the ranks of the GOP from deputy minority whip in 1988 to majority whip in 1995, and then majority leader in late 2002. Meanwhile, he was perhaps the single greatest driving force in Congress in the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the implosion of his presidency.Then came the Bush years and the dividends of Mr. DeLay’s machine politics. Texas Democrats were redistricted into oblivion, lobbyists strong-armed into hiring Republicans, and various battles were orchestrated and won by Mr. DeLay.In “No Retreat,” Mr. Delay tries to distance himself, dubiously, from the Bush legacy of big-government “compassionate conservatism” in lieu of his own small-government preferences. This from the man who, in late 2005, when asked about the burgeoning federal budget, said “[W]e’ve pared it down pretty good.” He practically built the Bush legacy, at least the House’s contribution. At one point he even defends the GOP’s prescription-drug boondoggle.Mr. DeLay’s philosophy is almost purely “man of action.” Most of the old, pre-1994 Republicans would sit around and simply talk big ideas, he writes. “They hoped that the force of their ideas would win the day. Crap. Ideas alone win nothing.” “If politics is the art of truth in pursuit of power,” Mr. Delay writes, “I am the man who builds the conduit from the truth to the power.”Not surprisingly, a large chunk of Mr. DeLay’s book is devoted to battling charges of money laundering, corruption, and campaign-finance shenanigans which, truth be told, are almost certainly trumped up and politically motivated. No surprise there, right?“What I did not expect was a concerted effort to destroy me legally, financially, and personally,” Mr. Delay writes. Now there’s an ironic turn: The House’s anti-Clinton warrior crying “politics of personal destruction.”Not that Mr. DeLay sees the irony. Regarding Clinton’s intern dalliances, Mr. DeLay says he “just hoped the whole thing would go away” and he “certainly understood a man’s sexual temptations.” The “hoped the whole thing would go away” bit is almost certainly a lie. At the very least, it is a plea for sympathy.Mr. DeLay just isn’t a very sympathetic character, though. He’s a political animal, a warrior. Throughout this memoir he likens Democrats and liberals to communists and fascists and thinks the worst about his political enemies’ motives. “[E]very time I faced down some liberal advance, [I knew] that today’s liberalism is an early stage of the same evil I experienced in Havana,” he writes.It shouldn’t be much of a surprise when critters in the same cage bite back.Mr. Conway is an editorial writer at the Washington Times.

Bringing Down The House of Reps.

Bringing Down The House of Reps.

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