Celebrities leave Dancing With The Stars for many reasons – because they’re injured, because they’re crap dancers.

And then there’s Tom DeLay. Tom DeLay is both. However, on last night’s Dancing With The Stars Tom DeLay was offed by injury, probably right before he could be offed by the fact that he dances like a peculiarly asthmatic sack that’s been filled with a bunch of lethargic kittens.

But Tom DeLay wasn’t the only celebrity to leave Dancing With The Stars last night. Debi Mazar was also eliminated, and once we’ve looked up her name on Wikipedia we’ll tell you exactly who she is.

Dancing With The Stars looks easy, doesn’t it? All you need to do is wriggle yourself into a succession of fairly absurd spangly hotpants and flap around with more self-control than Kelly Osbourne. And anyone could do that, right? You don’t even really need to be a star to appear on Dancing With The Stars, as proved by every single person who’s ever appeared on Dancing With The Stars ever.

But maybe, just maybe, Dancing With The Stars is a little harder than it looks. Maybe if you’re a slightly overweight 62-year-old politician whose career has become mired in a series of grubby money laundering accusations and you decided to do the show because you value material wealth over personal dignity, then Dancing With The Stars could pose a genuine threat to your health. Which certainly seems to be the case with Tom DeLay, who a) is all of those things and b) left Dancing With The Stars last night because he hurt his feet a bit. Newsday reports:

Twinkle-toes Tom is gone. And not a moment too soon – or so said his feet, both suffering from stress fractures. What a run… It was all very unusual. But fun, bizarrely so. Said DeLay, “Last night [my] feet were saying, ‘What did you do?’” Samantha Harris then asked, Will you continue? “No, I won’t. You can’t proceed if you can’t practice [or] you make a fool of yourself out there.”

So it’s farewell to Tom DeLay. We’re sad that we’ll never be able to see you gingerly grimace your way through another rudimentary routine that you’re clearly not physically equipped to participate in. However, Tom DeLay wasn’t the only contestant to leave Dancing With The Stars. Debi Mazar – who about six of you might recognise as the woman who occasionally shouts into a telephone for three seconds at a time once or twice during every other season of Entourage – was also sent packing. Not because she’d broken her feet, though. Because she was rubbish.

Now that Tom DeLay and Debi Mazar – plus whoever left the show last week – are no longer taking part in Dancing With The Stars, it’s really opened up the competition for the remaining contestants. After all, now we can really say that the chaff’s been removed from the, um, slightly larger pile of chaff. There’s a lot of chaff, that’s the point. There’s chaff everywhere.

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