I Was Wrong (Alert The Media)

I really don’t know if Tom Delay is guilty of anything or not, in fact, I admit I don’t know much about Tom Delay at all. But After reading about this case, It certainly appears that Ronnie Earle, Democrat District Attorney for Travis County, Texas, is indeed gunning for Delay, and will resort to false allegations to accomplish that goal.

The now famous Rep. Tom Delay indictment filed Wednesday in the 147th Judicial District Court in Travis County, Texas can be found here in it's entirety.

Read it. It is relatively short.

Notice that Mr Delay is mentioned only in the beginning of the document where it lists the defendants of the case and at the end where it mentions that he did “knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily waive the application of articles 12.01 and 12.03 of the Texas code of criminal procedure“…etc, etc, etc

What does this legalese mean? It means that Tom Delay allegedly knew of a conspiracy.

Allegedly.

There’s more to this than meets the eye. This website here claims that Travis county DA Ronnie Earle is a partisan hack who has been gunning for Tom Delay for years. Indeed, Earle has convened five other grand jury’s in the past for the purpose of indicting Mr. Delay but has failed every time. In addition to that, he has attempted on three separate occasions to obtain various indictments of Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Republican Senator from Texas, to no avail.

The Wall Street Journal has this on the subject:

The Majority Leader also deserves the presumption of innocence because of Mr. Earle's guilty past. A liberal Democrat, he has a history of indicting political enemies, Democrat and Republican, on flimsy evidence that didn't hold up in court. In the mid-1980s, he indicted Attorney General Jim Mattox, a rival of his ally Ann Richards, on bribery charges. Mr. Mattox was acquitted and won re-election.
In 1993, he indicted Kay Bailey Hutchison, who'd just been elected to the U.S. Senate, on charges of misconduct and records tampering. Mr. Earle was forced to drop the case even before it went to trial. Earlier this year, the prosecutor delivered a widely criticized speech at a Democratic fund-raiser in which he compared his prosecutorial targets to "Mussolini and his fascists" and all but declared that he had Mr. DeLay in his sights.

Other websites I have found indicate that Earle is simply a good ‘ol country lawyer who only wants to ferret out corruption in government.

A very noble cause, right?

Well, lets see what the Ronnie Earle apologists have to say about their hero.

Media Matters says:

While Earle is an elected Democrat, as Media Matters for America has previously noted, a March 17* editorial in the Houston Chronicle commended his work: "During his long tenure, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has prosecuted many more Democratic officials than Republicans. The record does not support allegations that Earle is prone to partisan witch hunts." This assertion supports Earle's own claim about his record; a March 6 article in the El Paso Times reported: "Earle says local prosecution is fundamental and points out that 11 of the 15 politicians he has prosecuted over the years were Democrats."

What the article doesn’t mention is that the Democrats that Earle indicted were political enemies of Earle, and Conservative Democrats at that.

Rush Limbaugh reports that Earle has dropped charges against major corporations in the past on the promise to him that they will contribute money to his pet projects. Captains Quarters does, too, saying:

“Ronnie Earle, the Texas prosecutor who has indicted associates of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in an ongoing campaign-finance investigation, dropped felony charges against several corporations indicted in the probe in return for the corporations' agreement to make five- and six-figure contributions to one of Earle's pet causes.”

There is a lot more to be found there. Read that, too.

That is called extortion, and if memory serves, extortion is illegal, too.

It is also interesting to note, that MSNBC and other “mainstream media outlets“, somehow conveniently fail to mention that fact, or the fact that Earle is a Democrat.

I was watching television this morning and I caught just enough of the Daily show to hear Jon Stewart, the very Liberal host, announce the indictment of Delay accompanied by a thunderous chorus of applause, hoots, and cheers. He failed to mention that Earle is a Democrat, also.

NOTE: It occurred to me that The Daily Show audience is a collection of people who don’t read, or at least, blindly accept any and everything that the Liberals tell them, never mind whether it’s true or not. In short, if they can read, they must read the New York Times, a newspaper that doesn’t let truth stand in the way of their “objective reporting“, as evidenced by the recent admission that the story reported by them regarding Geraldo Rivera, turned out to be manufactured out of whole cloth. That is at least the third time in the last year that they have been caught in a lie, so why would anyone ever take anything they say as fact?

After doing the additional research that I didn’t do yesterday before posting my comment, it has become clear that I owe Sean Hannity an apology. He was right. I was wrong. Rush is right, too. Ronnie Earle is just as much a partisan hack with a vendetta against Delay as they say he is.