DeLay book hammers his former colleagues

HOUSTON – Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s just-published memoirs skewer his former comrades in the historic 1994 Republican revolution for squandering the victory through useless and ineffective leadership.

DeLay’s book, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” which hit bookstores this weekend, singles out former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, DeLay’s predecessor as House majority leader. Former President Clinton is described as “slimy,” and President George W. Bush is dismissed as “compassionate, but … certainly no conservative.”

Only DeLay’s wife and daughter escape unscathed.

DeLay, dogged by charges of money laundering in Texas, resigned from Congress last June and is awaiting trial. He said that writing the book had been a “cleansing process” and that his co-author, Stephen Mansfield, “really captured me.”

DeLay blames Gingrich, who is mulling a 2008 presidential run, for the GOP’s inability to achieve many of its goals in the mid-1990s.

“Newt is an amazingly gifted man,” DeLay wrote. “He is intelligent, articulate, informed and passionate to a fault … . It is equally true, though, that he was an ineffective speaker of the House.”

DeLay paints Gingrich as vain, unable to translate his ideas into legislation and unsure how to push his party’s agenda. At Gingrich’s right hand was Armey, whom DeLay describes as “so blinded by ambition as to be useless to the cause.”

DeLay briefly acknowledges indiscretions with alcohol and women, describing himself during his early years in the Texas Legislature and Congress as a party boy with a roving eye.

“I drank too much,” he writes. “I slept with women I wasn’t married to. I neglected my family. This is the truth, and I recount it with a deep sense of grief that I ever lived in such a manner.”