Tom Delay---Do As I Say Not As I Do

You know, losing a loved one is a devastating experience to encounter. If you have experienced it as I have then you know without a doubt that this is the case. Imagine, if you would, a loved one, father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife, significant other lying in a hospital or hospice bed with no brain function and kept alive only by a respirator or feeding tube. Well sadly, like the Schiavo family, Tom Delay (R) Texas, and House Majority Leader also faced this type of tragedy. Only in his case there was no petitioning the court, no congressional bill and no president rushing back to sign the bill into law. No, Tom Delay was allowed to experience this tragedy in private with other family members. The LA Times is reporting the facts of this on there online news site. 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 a ventilator, was DeLay's father, Charles Ray DeLay. Of course back then he had just been re-elected to his third term in Congress and didn't have the clout he does today. Today, as House Majority Leader, DeLay has teamed with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to champion political intervention the Schaivo case. He pushed emergency legislation through congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary.And he 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. What a total hypocrite. According to the LA Times article, he and his family "just knew" his father would not want to live like this. He allowed his mother to make a decision to not continue with life support. This was her right as his spouse. Just like Michael Schiavo is Terri's spouse and it should be his right. "There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way he (Charles) wanted to live like that. Tom knew, we all knew, his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way." The article goes on to say that an aide to Delay says the two situations are not the same because Terri was being kept alive by feeding life sustaining fluids and nutrients. However there are many, many similarities also. There were also these similarities: Both stricken patients were severely brain damaged. Both were incapable of surviving without continuing medical assistance. Both were said to have expressed a desire to be spared life sustained by machine. And neither left a living will. Why is what was good for Tom (the hammer) Delay not good for Michael Schiavo?