Lifetime Achievement Award

I'm not sure what planet The Note was viewing from, but their fawning report on the Tom DeLay Memorial Dinner was about 180 degrees from what I watched on C-Span. Far from being "well done and seem[ing] to serve its purpose," my own impression was political wake--although Tom's corpse still twitches a bit...

When Bob Livingston is a featured speaker, the "message" isn't exactly one of sticking around and fighting.

Grover Norquist seemed to set the tone--in his absence:

Absent from the dais was one of Mr. DeLay's most outspoken defenders, Mr. Norquist, who was listed in the program as a sponsor. Earlier in the day he described the event as an important show of support for the majority leader.

But Mr. Norquist was not visible at the dinner and seats at his group's table remained empty. Nor was there any high-powered representative from the White House at the event.

The level of protest outside the Capitol Hilton was refreshing. A "carnival" invited people to spin a DeLay wheel of fortune (IIRC, one spin stopped either on 'lobbyist pays for your trips' or 'hire daughter and pay her $500,000'), signs asserted "DeLay is Slime," and plenty of the GOP polyester crowd looked uncomfortable as they filed in for their $250 dollar filet mignon, salmon, salad, wine, and dessert.

Now, I'll admit, I couldn't handle LISTENING to the show once it began--so instead, I muted the sound and read the closed captions. Still, here are several things I made mental notes of:

DeLay is about as photogenic as a dead armadillo. There was a bio-pic feature and whoever produced/edited the thing must've been hard up for ANY footage of The Hammer that suggested even a moderate degree of humanity. In the end, they settled for a shot of DeLay as Goober, mouth half open, not quite grinning, but at least not looking like he was about prey upon a small child.

A great deal of effort was made to project Tom as a family man, but his body language on the dias suggested the opposite.

The folks in the bio-pic attesting to Tom's character looked like...well, like salesmen from...Texas.

Tom's address, which hardly deviated from his standard stump speech, seemed shallow and tired--again, I was reading, not listening, so perhaps he managed to wring out a few rounds of applause with his particular brand of hate--but his body language was that of someone seriously contemplating the sunset, and his riding towards it.

It's possible that DeLay will stick around for a while--his schtick still sells in Texas--not quite to the extent it once did (though when that fails there's always the old-fashioned method of holding on, namely, larding on the pork in the district)--and the blind loyalty/lemming nature of the modern GOP offers him a chance to hold on to his position of national leadership. But I think Tom is seeing the end of the line. If I was a DNC operative, my strategery for 2006 would put Tom under the magnifying glass. The Hammer would quickly be revealed for what he really is--The Bug Man. And bugs don't fare all that well when you focus an intense beam of light on them.