Is Tom DeLay Out Of Touch Or Just Plain Stupid?

I'm watching MSNBC's Hardball and Chris Matthews has two Republicans on his show: Michelle Wallace who played a key message-crafting role in the McCain Campaign last year, and former Representative Tom DeLay. I'm sitting here totally dumbfounded over DeLay's insistence that former President Bush was "innocent" of blame for our current economic disaster.

Indeed, PBS's Frontline has a great series on this called "The Meltdown" which places blame for our current wave of bank failures right in the lap of them-Secretary Henry Paulsen, who famously let his own idiological moorings get in the way of good policy, when he refused to put the Government in position to buy Lehman Brothers thus causing a wave of failures that extends to today. According to Frontline, Paulsen was getting advise from Republicans to let businesses fail, and that's what he did.

What Paulsen didn't count on was a wave of market failure such that on September 18th, 2009, the American Economy as we know it came close to a complete death. Paulsen was placed in a role he didn't want or agree with, making government work rather than doing nothing. He failed.

Now, here we have DeLay out there on Hardball and Chris Matthews does an at best feckless attempt at countering Tom's claim that President Bush had nothing to do with this. Meanwhile when Matthews does take him on, he resorts to a quote in the Wall Street Journal.

Give me a break.