One of the most powerful men in the Republican Party and House of Representatives, as pontificated on the December 21 episode of Meet The Press.

[Concerning the "situation in Iraq."] "Well, I think it's very exciting."

"Iraq, as the president has said, is a battle in that war on terror, and we're going to fight terrorists whether it be in Israel, or Iraq, or Syria, or Afghanistan, or anywhere in the Philippines; this is a war that we're in." [Got that? Anywhere in the Philippines.]

"Well, first, Tim, I don't accept your premise. The president didn't overemphasize weapons of mass destruction as the only reason to go into Iraq." [As the President himself wondered aloud recently: "What's the difference" whether he had them or not?]

"He was violating UN resolutions for 10, almost 12 years. He violated every agreement that he made after he lost the war in Desert Storm." [Translation: no banned weapons found proves once and for all that he was violating resolutions mandating the destruction of his banned weapons...]

"This was the Clinton administration, who wasn't exactly good on the war on terrorism." [No comment.]

"So everybody knew that we had to have a regime change." ["Everybody," presumably, includes that 90% of the World's population opposed to the war. Does this mean that 90% of the World's people were Saddam apologists? No more so than anybody opposing a hypothetical war for "regime change" in the United States would want to be considered a Bush apologist. George Bush is, after all, a far, far, far greater threat to world peace that Saddam could ever conceive of being. But murdering tens of thousands of a country's people, irradiating its environment for 4.5 Billion years, uprooting it into complete chaos, shooting innocent civilians dead, destroying homes on the unproven "suspicion" that "bad guys" live there, selling off the country's resources to the "liberators"' cronies, et cetera might--just might--not be the best way to go about removing a Saddam (or a Bush, or a Sharon, or a Putin, or a Uribe, or a Musharraf...) from office.]

"If we don't find weapons of mass destruction--and I think we will, and we've already found evidence that not only did he have it, but he violated United Nations resolutions all along the lines, particularly when it comes to weapons instructions. So, you know, we are winning this war on terror." [Do we have a winner for the lost-train-of-thought-slash-non-sequitur-of-the-year award? And, actually, we didn't find any evidence that he had "it." We did hear credible testimony, before the war was initiated, indicating that he'd gotten rid of "it" no later than 1998, while the inspectors tasked with determining the status of Iraq's weapons programs bitterly denounced the "coalition"'s cutting short of the inspectors' work in order to begin bombing.]

"I knew that that would be the first thing the Democrats said after we got Saddam Hussein. They said, 'Oh, well, that's good we got Saddam Hussein, but you haven't gotten Osama bin Laden.' What we have gotten is we've destroyed his network. The president took the war to them in Afghanistan." [How embarrassing that the Department of "Homeland Security" raised the "terror-alert" level to "high" more less at the same time DeLay was speaking. Er, and, uh, he may have missed Ashcroft's warning of just a few months ago that, "The potential for us to be hit again is a very real potential," and the warning of Western and Arab intelligence agencies from just a few weeks ago that al-Qaida has "split into dozens of autonomous, hard-to-find 'franchises.'" Finally, what the fuck was Tom DeLay doing when he was supposed to be learning English grammar--out snorting lines with George W., or something?]

"You'd think it would come from the French or their party or from these demonstrators that demonstrate in the streets that you see. But these are supposed to be legitimate people saying some pretty outrageous things, like Wesley Clark." [Straight from the horse's mouth: the French or their party, and the demonstrators demonstrating in the street that you see (and, one assumes, the rest of the 90% of the World opposed to the Bush Doctrine), are "illegitimate." Though that's not how DeLay's gramatically-challenged sentence would literally decode.)

"If we left it up to Wesley Clark, Saddam Hussein would still be in place and he'd be paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel." [As it now stands, the American Taxpayer ponies up several billions of dollars a year in support of the Israeli occupation. (Uh, was DeLay mentioning UN resolutions before? No, didn't think so.)]

"But they've gone over the top. I mean, Howard Dean saying that we're not safer because Saddam Hussein is out of office..." [Of course, Hussein's been "out of office" since April. But anyway, damn that Tom Ridge!]

"If we were waiting for permission, we wouldn't be in Afghanistan." [He's right. While 90% of the World's population opposed the war on Iraq, something like 80% opposed the war on Afghanistan. Democracy can be a real bitch, sometimes.]

"Howard Dean just is an extreme extremist." [Maybe that's why Dean is so popular with the kids: he's extremely extreme. Sadly, DeLay did not classify Dennis Kucinich's standing on the extreme-scale.]

"Tax cuts will lower the deficit and bring us to balance. That's how we balance the budget." [No comment. Would make a nice children's song, though: "This is the way we balance the budget / Balance the Budget / Balance the Budget / This is the way we balance the Budget / Early in the morning."]

"You cut taxes so it leaves more money in people's pockets. They save. They invest. The economy grows. And from the economy, the revenues to the government grows. It's history. It's always happened that way." [No examples given.]

"It's how you balance the budget that's important. You know, the Democrats want to balance the budget by raising spending and raising taxes. The Soviet Union had a balanced budget. Well, you can raise taxes until you balance it, but the economy will go into the toilet. We have shown and we have credibility on the economy and the economy's recovering because of Republican policies." [No comment, except that: this motherfucker's meds are either working way too well or not nearly well enough. Maybe there's a puzzle-book logic problem in here somewhere: "Using only his Words of Wisdom displayed below, help Tom DeLay determine his proper dosage."]

-- Eddie Tews. For citations, feel free to log on to http://feedthefish.org/blog/archives/000244.html.