Poster Boy
by digby
So Tom Delay is cuttin’ and runnin’. I’m sure he’d like to stay in Texas, but the minorities have taken up all the good slots in prison.
My question is how these guys are going to explain themselves now. 3/30/05
Conservative leaders are crafting plans to launch a public campaign to defend House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).
The move follows a meeting last week among DeLay, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the chief deputy majority whip, and nearly two dozen conservative leaders, including David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute; and Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation.
Perkins, Keene and Feulner called the meeting, according to participants.
“It was a rallying cry to our conservative community that we are under assault. We need to fight back. We’re going to have a challenging year with the judicial issue bubbling up in the senate and the impact it may have on our ability to get things done,” said Cantor, who said he described to the group how Democrats and liberal groups have waged a coordinated battle to raise doubts about DeLay’s conduct.
Several of the conservative leaders who met last week are planning to launch a grassroots campaign targeted at conservatives in the districts of House Republican lawmakers whose support for DeLay may be wavering.
“The various organizations probably represent 3 or 4 million people,” Keene said of the conservative groups in the meeting. “We’re communicating with them to ask them to support DeLay and point out what is going on here.”
What is going on, conservatives say, is a coordinated effort by liberals and Democrats to tarnish DeLay’s name to oust him as majority leader and regain control of the House. Keene and others want conservative groups to communicate that to their members and to have their members relay the message to GOP lawmakers who represent them.
[…]
Most of the conservative leaders at last week’s meeting who spoke to The Hill said support for DeLay at the meeting appeared to be unanimous. But one who requested anonymity said his group would likely not participate in defending DeLay, and he raised questions about the propriety of tax-exempt groups’ waging a political campaign on behalf of a lawmaker.
Conservatives at the meeting received GOP research and press reports on millions of dollars in grants that George Soros’s Open Society Institute gave to groups critical of DeLay. The materials also described how several of the groups’ board members gave tens of thousands of dollars to help Democratic candidates and little if anything to help Republicans.
[…]
“I think that conservative groups ought to be concerned,” said Donald Hodel, who recently retired as head of Focus on the Family, “If conservative politicians are singled out for attacks by groups that have allegiance to a different worldview, if [conservatives] leave attacks to the liberal groups, they’re not going to have conservative politicians working for them.”
Blackwell, of the Leadership Institute, hinted that conservative groups will turn the attack back on Democrats and outside groups that are criticizing DeLay’s conduct, issuing a stern warning to Republican lawmakers who hang back from the battle.
“Any politician that hopes to have conservative support in the future better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay,” he said.
They claimed that Delay was the personification of conservatism and by God he is. He’s a crook and a coward. All these pontificating rightwing “moral majority” gasbags backed him to the hilt.
That’s your modern Republican Party for you. What’ll we tell the children?
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