Tom DeLay bites back
A thoughtful man at the eye of the storm
Plain speaking from the former US Republican majority leader
Perhaps registering even this Brit’s furrowing eyebrows at this point, DeLay gets into the kind of knockabout he is best at. ‘I’m enjoying global warming. London on Tuesday [in November] is wonderful. I expected to come here and freeze my ass off!’
‘There is climate change, of course, but there has always been climate change. It gets hotter, it gets colder, over time that’s the world correcting itself. What I am against is the incredible arrogance of man to think that he can affect the global climate.’
So is this a religious thing for the born-again DeLay?
‘For me? No, I’m a scientist.’
It was using his training in science that the young Tom DeLay got into his first business as a pest-controller. And it is on the subject of terrorist pest-control that DeLay finally begins to warm up.
DeLay’s criticisms of Israel in the War on Terror are — like his criticisms of America in the same war — not criticisms for doing too much, but for doing too little. He criticises the lack of drive, command and perseverance in the Long War. Strikingly loyal both to the Commander in Chief and to former secretary Rumsfeld, Tom DeLay nevertheless manages to go gratifyingly off-book when castigating America’s weakness towards her ally in the 2006 summer war.
‘Here they had the Hezbollah and they had to go to Lebanon and what do the United States do? They tried to discourage them from fighting the kind of war they should have been fighting, including not giving them one of our most important weapons that you can drop on the bunker that the Hezbollah would be in, in an apartment building, and not kill anybody around it, just kill the Hezbollah. And we wouldn’t give them the weapon. I mean what kind of friend is that? It’s ridiculous. We should have been urging them on and giving them all the resources they need to go clean out that rats’ nest. They had a great excuse.’
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Hal from NY
November 10th, 2007 3:11amTom Delay's nickname in Washington was "the Hammer." He saw the GOP as the true American party and his opponents and unpatriotic and disloyal. His medium-sized intellect seems to have no room for the idea of a loyal opposition, or of disagreement in good faith. And he was corrupt in office. He was a blight on the U.S. Congress, and not even particularly liked by his fellow conservatives. He is not missed in the slightest, as far as I can tell.