Who cares? Impeach the bastards before they destroy our country.

Perhaps this is just a cosmetic attempt.  However, cutting the head off the monster will disable the monster.  It really is effective to target leadership if you want to cripple a movement.  It's not just a question of shared ideology, but also of competence and, in Delay's case, degree of ruthlessness and a single-minded understanding of and obsession with power.

SFC - I am going to assume that you care about the truth of the matter and are not just trying to troll here.

Delay was indicted because he created, oversaw and managed a massive illegal political money-machine that channeled barely concealed bribes through a network of phony charities to help elect and pay-off Republicans.

He was not targeted because he was the Republican leader. He was Republican leader because he was ruthless enough to pursue these methods to gain power.  

Perhaps the lilywhite Tom Delay that exists in your imagination is the problem. We can quibble over legal technicalities, but unless you provide some evidence that he did not in fact do what he has done, your argument is facetious at best.

californiarealitycheck,

I'm going to add the word "completely". I'm afraid they have already partially destroyed some of what is the best about the USA. It's going to take quite awhile (if ever) to undo the damage done by this bunch of crooked, unethical, dishonest con artists who claim they love Jesus to pull off their cons. "Despicable" is not strong enough a word to describe them. I'll settle for "criminal" from Bush on down fairly far.

Actually tlees2 I'm going to go ahead and say that they've done some absolutely irreversible damage to the country.  I'll be specific about it too: they have absolutely ingrained into a large minority of the public (at best) that it is absolutely worth trading our most sacred liberties for any amount of added security.  That dramatic turn-about from an America that used to scream "Give me liberty or give me death!" to "Take my liberty, spare me death" means that for a majority of the voting public the political culture of the country has fundamentally changed from living up to the promises of the Revolution and forming a more perfect Union to merely guarding what advances we have made during 230 years of independence and even rolling some of them back so that we can live.  This transition may have occurred before, but it was this administration that really went forth and exploited it in a more permanent way (Nixon of course abused power in the same way, but those abuses saw a major backlash and to be perfectly honest I don't think there will be a huge backlash to the erosion of liberties this time around). 

That America is dead.  It will never be back. 

Arlen Specter owes America two - one for the "single-bullet theory" insanity and the other for his treatment of Anita Hill. To paraphrase a line from Spielberg's "Amistad" - it's time for a magnanimous gesture for posterity.

US History teacher speaking here: Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845 and was a fully functioning state by February 1846.

Representative Louise Slaughter's response to Bush's radio address was dead on. The Republican Party has become an "engine of patronage." Mark Shields pointed out on the News Hour last night that Tom DeLay never met a regulation he didn't hate. That meant that every corporation in the US was intent on feeding his coffers.

The result of all the patronage is a West Virginia Sago Mine that had "extensive safety problems" according to the federal regulators and 276 violations in 2004 and 2005, yet paid only $23,986 in fines. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-04-mine-violations_x.
htm?POE=NEWISVA

Along with cutting back on inspectors and easing up on citations, less than half of all fines on coal mines have been paid under the Bush administration.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/13568509
.htm

Not just in this most recent and egregious case, the republicans HAVE engaged in an "unprecedented attempt to eliminate the will of the American people from the legislative process." Just as Representative Slaughter has so eloquently pointed out. In that way the New Boss will be just like the Old Boss.
http://democrats.org/a/2006/01/congresswoman_l.php

When W replaced Ann Richards?

Yea, but what happens when the FBI reveals a list of who wore a ware in recent months?  If they convinced Duke Cunningham to do it, and the Wall Street Jouranl says that Abramoff has fingered another sixty -- chances are that DeLay may have either worn one himself in the interests of a diminished sentence, or one of his buddies has him on tape.  Republicans need to be careful whom they get behind these days.  Make it hard for them -- connect every mentioned candidate to the Abramoff-DeLay-Cunningham money machine.