Mr. Tom DeLay

A hypocritical piece of work there... The latest example comes from two sources and deals with the Terri Schiavo case: From the LA Times:

DeLay's Own Tragic Crossroads
A family tragedy that unfolded in a Texas hospital during the fall of 1988 was a private ordeal � without judges, emergency sessions of Congress or the debate raging outside Terri Schiavo's Florida hospice.

And the story:

More than 16 years ago, far from the political passions that have defined the Schiavo controversy, the DeLay family endured its own wrenching end-of-life crisis. The man in a coma, kept alive by intravenous lines and oxygen equipment, was DeLay's father, Charles Ray DeLay.

Then, freshly reelected to a third term in the House, the 41-year-old DeLay waited, all but helpless, for the verdict of doctors.

Today, as House Majority Leader, DeLay has teamed with his Senate counterpart, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), to champion political intervention in the Schiavo case. They pushed emergency legislation through Congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary.

And DeLay is among the strongest advocates of keeping the woman, who doctors say has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, connected to her feeding tube. DeLay has denounced Schiavo's husband, as well as judges, for committing what he calls "an act of barbarism" in removing the tube.

In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die.

"There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old widowed mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew � we all knew � his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."

Emphasis mine -- this is an issue of the Federal Government trying to do away with States Rights and this stinks to high heaven! Our Founding Fathers worked long and hard to develop documents that would protect each state's rights while simultaneously providing for a minimal Federal government to regulate Military, Standards (highway, rail, electrical power). The structure of the United States of America is a Federated Republic of States, not a centralized bureaucracy. The second link comes from The Misanthropyst:

When even the Wall Street Journal points out that Republican Tom DeLay, the two-legged roach, is an example of all that is wrong with American politics, you gotta figure his shelf life is limited:

"...The problem, rather, is that Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits. Mr. DeLay's ties to Mr. Abramoff might be innocent, in a strictly legal sense, but it strains credulity to believe that Mr. DeLay found nothing strange with being included in Mr. Abramoff's lavish junkets.

Nor does it seem very plausible that Mr. DeLay never considered the possibility that the mega-lucrative careers his former staffers Michael Scanlon and Mr. Buckham achieved after leaving his office had something to do with their perceived proximity to him. These people became rich as influence-peddlers in a government in which legislators like Mr. DeLay could make or break fortunes by tinkering with obscure rules and dispensing scads of money to this or that constituency. Rather than buck this system as he promised to do while in the minority, Mr. DeLay has become its undisputed and unapologetic master as Majority Leader.

Whether Mr. DeLay violated the small print of House Ethics or campaign-finance rules is thus largely beside the point. His real fault lies in betraying the broader set of principles that brought him into office, and which, if he continues as before, sooner or later will sweep him out..."

...just typical Texas politics writ large -- you bribe my back, I send tax dollars your way...

Indeed...