Tom DeLay IS Jean-Claude van Damme.

I have very good cause to dislike Tom Delay.

Because of his behind-the-scenes work in gerrymandering Texas' voting districts, my area lost a fine, smart, effective representative in Martin Frost, a Democract, and got stuck with the right-wing rubber-stamp Pete Sessions. Americans in general have good cause to dislike Tom DeLay, given what he has done to partisan politics. Hell, many in the Republican Party aren't too fond of him because of the way he's made the GOP into the party of pork, plunder and influence-peddling.

But even I don't think there's any real similarity between O. J. Simpson's book -- the one that got Judith Regan fired -- and Tom DeLay's memoir, which is titled No Retreat, No Surrender. But according to a Raw Story report, a staffer inside Penguin, parent company to the conservative imprint Sentinel, claimed there was an uproar over the book, made the comparison to OJ and objected to publishing the book of an indicted man. The source compared Sentinel's editor, Bernadette Malone, and her money-minded choices to Regan.

This is pretty trivial stufff -- trivial, backbiting nonsense from what sounds like a vengeful co-worker, and hardly on par with Ms. Regan's offenses. There must be any number of authors whom Penguin publishes who have faced legal charges over the years -- and any number that individual editors might object to. Let Sentinel publish DeLay's book. The fact is, it's already a preposterous bit of defiant posturing -- that is, unless the title gets changed to No Retreat, No Surrender ... but Resigning from Office is Still Heroic and Manly.

By the way, if anyone can find the origin of that phrase, "No retreat, no surrender," I'd be curious to learn it. It's popped up in several hip-hop songs and book titles over the years (and a Babylon 5 episode), but Bartleby.com, for instance, has no source, no original quotation for it. It always struck me as what Hitler ordered the Panzerkorps to do on the Russian front, an order no sensible general would ever give or follow.

In any event, whatever the phrase's source, I will now always associate Tom DeLay with Jean-Claude van Damme's 1986 debut in martial arts flickery, No Retreat, No Surrender, a film so completely cheeseball, it makes the famously wooden van Damme's later cinematic efforts look like genius.