Faced with declining poll numbers in his re-election race for the House, Tom Delay chose to step aside in order to keep his seat in Republican hands.

In 2004, we defeated democrat Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle fair and square, campaigning against him on issues and positions. In return, democrats have successfully driven the Republican House Majority Leader out of office, by calculatedly dragging out a partisan prosecution based on trumped up charges. Tom Delay’s career was not brought to an end by wrong-doing. It was brought to an end by ruthless partisanship, the manipulation of the legal system, and by successful use of the MSM propaganda machine.

Today, the left-side of the Blogosphere is celebrating, and the right-side of the blogosphere is blandly reporting Delay’s resignation as a news story, or worse, welcoming it.

Glenn Reynolds shrugs, cites Delay’s unfortunate “no fat left in the budget” line, and says “I was never much of a fan.” Wake up, people, we have suffered a serious defeat.

The left has demonstrated again, as it did with Newt Gingrich, that when a conservative Republican becomes too powerful, too influential, too effective, they can take him out.

First, the media machine goes to work on demonizing him as a personality. An endless series of photos with surly, snarly, or goofy expressions will be published, accompanied by lovingly detailed reporting of every indiscreet expression, gaffe, or unwise remark. After many months, the public naturally develops the sense that there’s this really mean, and strange in a sinister kind of way, guy, who’s somehow suddenly become terribly important in Washington, and who is a threat to everything that’s good.

Then, come the scandals. “We already knew he was nasty and strange, who would have imagined he was also a crook?”

A political career today is like a running a restaurant in the Big City. if they want to close you down, they send in the health and the building inspectors, and there are so many regulations, the building code is so large and so detailed, that is impossible to be in complete compliance, if they need to, they can always find a violation. In Delay’s case, they sent in Ronnie Earle (a leftwing activist who has used the Bolshevik base of a big university to get elected county prosecutor) to cook up a few alleged violations of arcane campaign finance regulations, which charges he had to run repeatedly past rubber-stamp grand juries before he could get one to vote an indictment.

But today, months have dragged by, that bogus Texas prosecution has remained unresolved, a new lobbying scandal has erupted, and the liberal meda has been hammering on him for what seems like forever. NowTom Delay finds himself in the position of some famous outlaw trying to win the votes of a constituency which is wondering why he isn’t already in jail. It’s common knowledge, at this point, that this Delay fellow is some kind of a crook, a nasty customer, and the kind of guy who bullies people and breaks all the rules. Who’s going to vote for Black Bart for Congress?

Delay’s a keen politician. Seeing he was losing, Tom Delay decided he would take a bullet for the Grand Old Party, and resign. The left rejoices, but you cannot find a sympathetic word for poor old Tom Delay on the right this morning. I know a fellow who has been in the Conservative Movement since its early days, who has often remarked that “the Conservative Movement has never learned to care for its wounded, or bury its dead.” Days like today suggest he may be right.

I didn’t like that Congressional budget either, but I know that Tom Delay is one of us: a Republican and a conservative. He has fought with us on the same side for decades, and we owe him something. On mere practical political grounds, we should also not be quite so cooperative, when the left undertakes one of these carefully contrived political assassinations. How many strong and competent Congressional leaders do you think we are ever going to find? If we let our adversaries destroy the reputations of each one of them in turn, and drive all of them from office, the left is certainly going to win.

The NY Times reports:

In letters sent Saturday to fellow House Republicans and to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Mr. DeLay said he supported the call for an election for a new leader and was stepping aside to avoid becoming a political liability as Republicans battle to hold their majority.

“The job of majority leader and the mandate of the Republican majority are too important to be hamstrung, even for a few months, by personal distractions,” said Mr. DeLay.

Mr. DeLay intends to seek re-election to his seat representing the Houston suburbs and reclaim his position on the Appropriations Committee.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio said of Delay:

I can say without hesitation he is one of the most effective and gifted leaders the Republican Party has ever known.”

The Supreme Court will hear appeals from four plaintiffs’ groups, representing democrats, minorities, the city of Austin, and it surrounding county, of Appeals Court rulings upholding the Republican redrafting of Texas’ congressional districts map.

Anti-Republican elements in the Justice Department (could those be the same ones who picked Fitzgerald as special prosecutor?) have leaked a 2003 memo “endorsed” by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, which opines that the Texas legislature’s redistricting plan, since upheld twice by a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, may violate the Voting Rights Act, to the Washington Post.

Post staff writer Dan Egger artfully mixes generous helpings of inflammatory charges by democrat partisans, conceptually promoting an internal staff memo advancing one point of view to the level of statutory law, with the minimum essential inconvenient facts, and reference to the (partisan) indictment of Representative Delay, topped by the censorious conclusion of a purportedly objective outside expert,

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law (as an adjunct) at American University (who) said it was ‘highly unusual’ for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.”

And voila! we have a brand-new Bush Administration Conspiracy to Violate the Law.

Armando over at Daily Kos is gloating, and has overnight collected some 122 moonbat comments remarking gleefully on the Bush Administration’s “arrogance and contempt for democracy.”