"Allowing their strong House leaders to be picked off one at a time is an unforgiveable Republican Party weakness."
Exactly.
This editorial makes this point very clear:
Keep DeLay, or pay the price
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1382611/posts
"They should remember the political maxim that while the law will take care of the guilty, when a politician is innocent of the charges being thrown at him, he can only be brought down by his own side. I have been in a lot of political fights -- from the Goldwater campaign in '64, to almost all of Reagan's fights, to slugging it out side by side with my old boss Newt Gingrich back in the '90s -- and I've never been in one where sacrificing innocent comrades helped in the long run. Human sacrifice had been almost completely extinguished with the passing of the Aztecs -- until the Republican Party came along.
If a party can be stampeded -- by phony charges and a run of shoddy stories in whorish newspapers -- into dumping their most effective congressional leader, I wouldn't give two cents for their near term future. A party that would voluntarily cut off its own testicles and FedEx them to their opponent as a trophy is not likely to manifest any regenerative powers. That's the thing about losing those organs."
If they abandon DeLay, it will nail their coffin shut.