Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Saturday that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay "ought to go back to Houston, where he can serve his jail sentence."
Mr. Dean's remark, in a speech to Massachusetts Democrats at their party convention, drew an immediate rebuke from Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat and one of Mr. DeLay's harshest critics, the Boston Globe reports.
"That's just wrong," Mr. Frank said in an interview on the convention floor. "I think Howard Dean was out of line talking about DeLay. The man has not been indicted. I don't like him, I disagree with some of what he does, but I don't think you, in a political speech, talk about a man as a criminal or his jail sentence."
Mr. DeLay faces accusations that he may have violated House rules by taking foreign trips paid for by lobbyists. In a separate case, a Texas grand jury indicted three fundraisers with ties to Mr. DeLay on accusations of campaign-finance irregularities.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
