"Being called vindictive and partisan by Tom DeLay is like being
called ugly by a frog."
Ronnie Earle
The prosecutor talked about his investigation into Republican
corporate contributions and mentioned Mr. DeLay.
"This case is not just about Tom DeLay," he told the audience.
"If it isn't this Tom DeLay, it'll be another one, just like one bully
replaces the one before."
Mr. Earle seemed surprised at the uproar that ensued.
"I'll make that same speech to any group that was interested in open
and honest government," he said.
Mr. Earle has long shrugged off his critics, saying his record of
putting crooked officials and violent criminals in jail speaks for
itself.
But he once told Texas Monthly that he did not want to be buried in
the State Cemetery in Austin, but instead wished to be cremated.
He had made so many people angry, he said, that they would be lining
up to desecrate his grave.
From The New York Times, 9/29/05:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/politics/29earle.html?ex=1285646400&en=7ad274c0a5bdc318&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
HOUSTON -
Being vilified as a "rogue district attorney," a "fanatic" and "an
unabashed partisan zealot," among other epithets, was not the worst
part of his day, said Ronnie Earle, hours after announcing the
indictment of Representative Tom DeLay and two associates.
"Mostly, I haven't had any lunch," said Mr. Earle, the Travis County
prosecutor, speaking from his office in Austin.
"I ate an energy bar. It helped a little. That stopped me from gnawing
on people's heads."
Mr. Earle, 63, an institution and endangered species - a Texas
Democrat - now in his eighth elected four-year term, said he was
ignoring the attacks by Mr. DeLay and his supporters after Mr. DeLay,
the powerful Texas Republican and House majority leader, was charged
with conspiring to violate Texas election law by contributing
corporate money to candidates for the Texas Legislature in 2002.
But Mr. Earle would not let it pass, it turned out.
"I find they often accuse others of doing what they themselves do," he
said.
"And what else are they going to say?"
"This is about protecting the integrity of our electoral system and I
couldn't just ignore it," he said.
Mr. Earle, a former state representative who won his first election
for district attorney in 1976 and has run away with every race since,
is famously unbridled, responding last year to an earlier attack by
the majority leader by saying, "Being called vindictive and partisan
by Tom DeLay is like being called ugly by a frog."
When Congressional Republicans sought last year to protect Mr. DeLay
by changing the rules requiring an indicted leader to step down, Mr.
Earle condemned the action as "open contempt for moral values" in an
Op-Ed article in The New York Times.
The move was later rescinded.
Yet on Wednesday at a news conference in a law library near the Travis
County Courthouse, Mr. Earle, in announcing the indictment, was
uncharacteristically close-mouthed and stern as he turned away
questions about the evidence and other aspects of the investigation.
But he denied that politics had played any role, as Mr. DeLay and his
lawyers claimed.
"I would expect that that would be their response," Mr. Earle said.
"This is what they believe of themselves."
____________________________________________________________
"Being called vindictive and partisan by Tom DeLay is like being
called ugly by a frog."
Ronnie Earle
Harry
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