This shouldn’t be necessary, but it’s quickly becoming apparent that the principal line of defense for Tom DeLay is smearing Travis County DA Ronnie Earle. Again.<\/p>\n
This isn’t new, of course. Earle is a self-identified Dem, but he’s been a play-it-straight District Attorney. To accuse this guy of having some kind of personal\/ideological vendetta against DeLay is absurd.<\/p>\n
For months, the anti-Earle campaign has manifested itself in a variety of ways. DeLay’s allies have been in discredit mode for the better part a year, with DeLay saying<\/a> Earle is “trying to criminalize politics,” Peter King (R-NY) calling him a “runaway prosecutor<\/a>,” and Henry Bonilla going to so far as to describe him as a “partisan crackpot<\/a> district attorney.” Fox News, predictably, has played by the Republicans’ playbook<\/a>, while the Texas GOP has tried to strip Earle of his legal authority<\/a> as a DA.<\/p>\n In other words, it’s been a typical right-wing smear. And it’s about to get worse.<\/p>\n As long as Republicans try to make this about Earle’s non-existent partisan agenda, it’s worth taking a moment to set the record straight. First, the indictment today came by way of a grand jury of Texans, not the prosecutor’s office. DeLay and his allies might try to smear the grand jury members too, but that’s another story.<\/p>\n Second, in Texas, DAs are elected, not appointed, and Earle has consistently earned the public’s trust.<\/p>\n Third, over the scope of Earle’s 28-year career, he’s prosecuted 16 elected officials — 12 of whom were Democrats. If this is a DA with a partisan agenda, he has a funny way of showing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This shouldn’t be necessary, but it’s quickly becoming apparent that the principal line of defense for Tom DeLay is smearing Travis County DA Ronnie Earle. Again. This isn’t new, of course. Earle is a self-identified Dem, but he’s been a play-it-straight District Attorney. To accuse this guy of having some kind of personal\/ideological vendetta against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}