Tom DeLay & Chris Matthews smooch Fest

Tom DeLay & Chris Matthews
Chris Matthews' no-holds-barred interview with Tom DeLay aired last night, during which DeLay was able to clear his name on several accounts. Among the hard-hitting questions: "Okay I've got to ask you a cosmic question, you're Tom Delay. You're not in this business for the money. You live modestly. You commute back and forth from Washington to Houston, Texas. Why? What drives you every day?"
(For more on DeLay's "modest" lifestyle, the Plank recommends this AP piece.)
During the interview, that trouble DeLay has been having with the renegade prosecutor in Texas was quickly explained away as a tremendous conspiracy amongst the members of the Texas judicial system - which is the only way to characterize DeLay's belief that a politically-motivated prosecutor can successfully indict DeLay on a law "that [doesn't] make sense" (the law is one against Money Laundering).
Among DeLay's more entertaining explanations is that the indictment was brought by a grand jury "that didn't even go through orientation" - I suppose they missed the "Tom DeLay is never to be indicted" part of the orientation, then.
When the subject of the Abramoff investigation came up, where one of DeLay's former top aides, Michael Scanlon, has pled guilty to bribery and fraud, DeLay got a little carried away:
There's nothing they can say against me unless they lie. I've had it all checked out by my lawyers and everything that we've done has a clean bill of health. Department of Justice has told my lawyers on several occasions that I'm not a target of this investigation. We have no problem here. All we have are leftist groups trying to create a sense of guilt by association in this case. They can not tell you or charge me with one thing that's against the law or against the House rules or even unethical.
It's worth pointing out that one does not receive a target letter from investigators (meaning that you're in immediate danger of being charged) until you're a target. But the fact that you haven't received a letter certainly does not mean that you never will. So that's a meaningless comment.
On the subject of his golfing trip to Scotland in 2000, DeLay asserted that the trip had been paid for by "a legitimate conservative organization....there was no pass through." Apparently Jack Abramoff's credit card is a legitimate conservative organization?
(The Fix has more.)