Tom DeLay, amnesiac (he has forgotten the face of his father)

I've been watching Tom DeLay juke around ethics charges for the last couple of years. Now comes along an issue he can really relate to: Terri Schiavo. Not so much as a person, but as an object. She died today, despite Congressional interference. While I'm not glad she's dead, I am glad she's no longer suffering. I will not go into the whole "she wasn't suffering" debate right now. I will say that she didn't exactly seem to be thriving, or even improving for that matter. This particular discussion is not so much about her condition as it is about Tom DeLay's.

This past Monday I read with great interest an article by William Saletan on Slate.com that outlined Tom's response to a family tragedy that paralleled the Schiavo case in several ways. To get to the point: in 1988 his dad suffered catastrophic brain damage and went into a coma. Tom and family decided to pull the plug, despite the fact that Dad reacted when his son entered the room. Apparently there was no overarching "culture of life" in 1988 that required the attention of Congress and the president. At least not a noticeable one, or one that had any impact, as far as Tom was concerned. (I will avoid the obvious temptation here to make some sort of bad-taste allusion to Tom's being a former exterminator. But it's tempting. Boy is it.)

So he and his family made the decision to unplug his father because, as the article states, "they inferred, without written evidence, that Charles [dad] wouldn't have wanted" to go on living in "this condition." So I found it rather interesting (in the Midwestern sense of the word) that although Michael Schiavo had decided the same thing (although purportedly with Terri's prior verbal consent), it was wrong, wrong, wrong. I can feel my blood pressure begin to soar as I reflect on this bald-faced hypocrisy.

I won't dive into the ramifications of Congressional intervention on behalf of a single citizen. However, I will dive into the hypocrisy evinced by Tom DeLay. Surely it was agonizing for Michael Schiavo to have to see his wife in a terminal vegetative state. It was agonizing for all of America to see her like that. We'll never know if Terri Schiavo explicitly told Michael that she was not to be kept alive by artificial means. We have to give him the benefit of the doubt. People will tell a spouse lots of things they will never tell a parent, which is why these types of medical decisions are made by spouses (generally). This didn't matter to Tom, even though his family went through much the same thing. Do as I say, not as I did.

All of the bloviating Tom DeLay has done in the supposed service of Terri Schiavo has only done one thing, really: driven home the fact that not only is he ethically challenged (see here, here, and here), but he is also a raging hypocrite who will hopefully eventually get a major comeuppance. Saletan talks about the slippery slope that begins to form when you approach tragedy as a politician and not as a family member. It makes it easy to impose standards that would have had you breaking the law when you made a similar decision 16 years ago. You see the sick individual more as an object than a human being, one worthy of love and respect, even if that love and respect results in her demise (presumably desired by her). Congress already meddles too much in the lives of Americans, and in this case, they ought to have left well enough alone. At least they should have thought about Terri Schiavo more as a human being and less as a "cause." The woman deserved that at the very least.

Rest in peace, Terri Schiavo.