Certainly Delay is a symbol.  You can't put shit back in the elephant

Having DeLay in the Congress was bad for everything Democrats stand for.  Thus having DeLay out of Congress is good.  Period.

Any other analysis makes us look scared of winning.

The other issue, as I see it, is that it's hard to see how having headlines of "Delay to quit Congress" and "Delay resigns in disgrace" appearing periodically over the next couple of months is going to help Republicans.  

Most people don't even know who Delay is.  So, what they're going to remember from this is headlines about some corrupt Republican resigning.  They're also getting that every time they hear about Duke Cunningham or Jack Abramoff or Scooter Libby.  The corruption idea is also reinforced every time something strange that Rove has done comes up, or every time they think about the disastrous response to Katrina, or Halliburton, or Iraq generally.  Delay resigning keeps this theme alive in the air some more for the next couple of months.

While Delay's resignation may help Republicans in TX-22, it should hurt Republicans across the rest of the country by re-emphasizing their corruption in many people's minds.

Yes!!  Wed need to hit them hard now!  We cannot let them strip down their big faces and act as though they have "cleaned" up their party!  In reality they have done nothing.  At best they have eliminated the virus without fixing any of the organs that it fucked up over the last ten years.  We need to point giners at every republican who has been touched by Delay, by Cunningham, for Christs sake by Bush, Cheny, Rove, et al.  We need to be talking, we need to be doing!!

Kerry has always had a plan.  He pushed Bush to the UN and Congress in 2002. He warned about rebuilding the country "That effort is going to be long term, costly, and not without difficulty, given Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions and history of domestic turbulence." He's the one that said not to rush to war in Jan 2003, and laid out the correct path to take. He pressed for a better reconstruction effort in July 2003, "Peacekeeping is linked to the humanitarian and to the governance transformation and the global investment in that is the fastest, most effective way to be able to strengthen our goals and provide safety to our troops." He warned about civil war in his speech in Missouri in 2004. He called for benchmarks and a plan to turn over the country, sector by sector, last October.

It's only logical that he would continue striving to end this war, as he did before it even started.  His plan is crystal clear, if the Iraqis make real efforts at governance, we sponsor a "Dayton Accords-like summit... in a neutral setting, Iraqis, working with our allies, the Arab League and the United Nations, would be compelled to reach a political agreement that includes security guarantees, the dismantling of the militias and shared goals for reconstruction."   If this is successful, we stay until the end of 2006, but no longer.  If not, it's May 15 and we're out.

I sincerely hope this doesn't turn into another liberal turf war and that we can use some common sense and come together to end this war.

and you're left with today's conventional wisdom, poll-driven, inside the beltway political strategist approach to politics, still sadly accepted and practiced by all too many Democratic politicians and even leaders.

Whatever happened to doing what's right on principle?

Whatever happened to listening to your gut insticnts?

Whatever happened to fighting back, especially when attacked?

Whatever happened to calling out incompetence, injustice and corruption?

Whatever happened to winning and not just not losing?

When the other side is doing something that's morally wrong, clearly illegal, and just plain not working, you are not only MORALLY and ETHICALLY obliged to call it out, but POLITCALLY obliged, or else you don't just LOOK weak, you ARE weak.

Backing down from a righteous, necessary and winnable fight is not the way to win back the trust and respect of the electorate, and thus have a chance at winning back the the house, senate and white house.

I can't believe that they STILL don't get this.

It's the same "every story is bad for us" mentality that neuters any Democratic attacks, any attempts to define the other side.

Matt

Thanks for noting that Kerry has come out with a withdrawal plan, I didn't see a link. Kerry's OP/ED and some bullet points on his plan are here http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=25 27

I am told, there will be more to come from Kerry on this over the next couple of days.

If only the "Spineless Dems" would get out of the way and let Feingold and Dean show them the way.

Really, really, sick of Feinstein, Boxer and worst of all Pelosi and their failure to fight for our country.

Probably the best thing is for the "Dickhead Dems" not to take the House. It would be much easier to clean house from the bottom up.

If you think I'm harsh of foolish check out David Sirota's post here every lick-spittle Democratic leader needs to be purged. And yes I mean purged.
 

"Any Republicans out there have a plan?"

The Republican Party has a plan. Several, in fact.

Plan A: Swiftboat the media.

Plan B: Swiftboat the opposition -- which means everyone who doesn't agree with the GOP (i.e. a majority of the American people and the world).

Plan C: Distract people with other issues, like immigration.

See? The GOP has several McCarthyist options to work with.

The catatonic faces and drooling were so prescient.

Please Dems:

Keep copies of those fine tributes to Tom Delay yesterday. Use them in ads in the fall.

I'm telling you, you don't often get the chance to have tapes of the President, Speaker of the House and other Top Republicans praising a known crook.

This demonstrates that it's more than one crooked guy, but a culture of Republican corruption.

This is gold.

Yes, it is good news for Democrats and people generally who oppose corruption.  But there is some irrational exuberance going on too.  DKos was going nuts the other night with this.

DeLay still has some juice, he is still working in Washington on what somebody called "wingnut welfare" and is still owed 500,000 favors on the Hill.

We can party when his criminal appeal gets denied cert by SCOTUS or when he dies.  Until then, drink coffee not champagne.

Kerry's got a plan, sure, but not much of one. Totally unrealistic this expectation that the threat of a pull-out means anything to anyone in Iraq with any power.

Virtually all power bases likely to emerge in the coming warlord period in Iraq (Sadr and the Badr brigades, the Kurds in the north who will gain defacto independance not unlike what one sees in Puntland today, which suits them fine, the Sunni "insurgents," and let's not forget Iran) couldn't give a shit about US threats. You want to take your toys and go home if we don't play nice? Please, do go away! And don't let the door hit you on the ass, great satan!  

Really a poor job here , Kerry, not unlike the joke he pulled on all of us with Alito and his toothless threat of filibuster from Davos of all places. Where do you figure Kerry was when one of his staffers wrote this gem of a strategy piece for him? Let me guess - his chalet in Idaho? Or mebbe that vacation home in Nantucket?

This is what DC Dems wanted us to run with in '04, and is the same kind of crap they think still plays today? And people wonder why the Democrats suck so bad, that it takes a GOP implosion for them to be competitive.

Pitiful.

Take off the pads, and this netminder's a sieve.

On a national level I agree 100%.  The corruption problem is not going away.

In TX-22, having DeLay gone makes our job much harder.  The demos for Lampson weren't great to begin with but he had a decent shot against DeLay since he is under indictment.  Against another opponent who is not linked to DeLay's problems, Lampson's job just got harder.  It is doable but tough.

Actually the Dems came up with a united plan last week.

Kerry was on the dais while it was being presented. Guess he didn't like being in the back ground....party unity be damned.

Political posturing is all he knows.

Tom Delay's resignation is an admission of guilt, and should me spoken about as such. This is FURTHER PROOF of the Republican Culture of Corruption -- they are so corrupt, their top man in the House had to leave his position and eventually resign from office altogether.

Delay's departure does not cleanse the Republican party's image at all, in fact, it reinforces their image as a courrpt party.