Liberal war on terrorism heats up: Delay finally captured

Ann Coulter

If only liberals were half as angry at the people who flew planes into our skyscrapers as they are with Tom DeLay, we might have two patriotic parties in this country.

Any Republicans who didn't ferociously defend Tom DeLay — which is to say, almost all Republicans in Congress, the president, and alleged conservative writers trying to impress the editorial board of The New York Times — better hope liberals never come after them. The only proven method for a Republican to avoid having his name turned into a liberal malediction is to be completely ineffective. You'll notice there's no "Stop Lamar Alexander Before It's Too Late" Web site.

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, Oliver North, Clarence Pendleton, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay — all these men saw their names used as curse words.

Only one of them was ever indicted. To wit, the comical indictment of DeLay recently brought by political hack Ronnie Earle. To finally get some grand jury to hand up an indictment, Earle had to empanel six grand juries in Austin, Texas, which is like the Upper West Side with more attractive people. In addition, DeLay knows Republican and gambling lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates, who have recently pleaded guilty to various other incomprehensible charges.

Liberals spit out all these names with more venom than they've ever been able to muster for names like "Saddam Hussein" and "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."

Even proud American corporations find their names being turned into curse words by liberals, such as "Halliburton," which is currently losing money in Iraq in order to supply food to our troops — you know, the same troops liberals pretend to love (but don't lose money feeding).

I spent a couple of hours listening to liberal hate radio this week to try to figure out what crime against God and man Tom DeLay is even alleged to have committed. But all I heard was the name "Tom DeLay" and "PRISON!" mentioned in the same sentence over and over again.

Back when Newt Gingrich still scared liberals, the House Ethics Committee spent years probing various charges against him, focusing on the charge that a college class he taught was ... partisan! Meanwhile, they're teaching Marxism in comp lit classes, Islamic terrorism in Indian experience classes, and Druidism in divinity classes. As we speak, freshmen in English 101 classes all over the country are rushing to complete their term papers on how all heterosexual sex is rape. Over a million dollars later, the committee realized: Wait a second. This is a college class!

But at the urging of the Democrats, the Internal Revenue Service spent 3 1/2 years investigating Gingrich's college course. After all the hullabaloo, the result was: No crime. The classes "were not biased toward particular politicians or a particular party" — thus distinguishing Gingrich's class from every other college course in America.

To the contrary, Gingrich's college class spent more time praising FDR and JFK than praising Reagan. (Did you know that FDR's radio broadcast after Pearl Harbor included an eight-minute prayer? You would have learned that in Newt's course.)

But the mere mention of the name "Newt Gingrich" was proof of criminal conduct in the '90s.

When Democrats are accused of wrongdoing, it's usually something more like what most people think of as a crime, say, punching a Capitol Hill policeman.

Or perhaps by being captured on tape in hotel rooms stuffing wads of cash into their pockets from Arab sheiks — as Democrats were during the Abscam investigation. This was back when Democrats controlled Congress. Consequently, Congress responded to this shocking proof of criminality by their colleagues by ... investigating the FBI for investigating members of Congress.

The "rule of law" means something entirely different for Republicans and Democrats. Consider the case of a prosecutor faced with the same possible wrongdoing by a Republican office-holder and a Democrat office-holder at the same time.

In the midst of Ronnie Earle's witch hunt of Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison for allegedly using her office for campaign purposes — begun days after she was elected to the U.S. Senate by a 2-1 margin — employees in former Democratic Gov. Ann Richards' office admitted that they destroyed almost three years' worth of long-distance billing records that were supposed to be preserved — to ensure the office wasn't being used for campaign purposes, among other things.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, Earle promptly "cleared (Richards) and her staff of wrongdoing, saying there was no evidence of criminal intent."

Conservatives live under a jurisprudence of laws, but they get prosecuted under liberals' jurisprudence of epithets.