The Biggest F***ing Bastard on the Face of the Earth
Tom DeLay - March 18th, 2005:
This is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight that fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what’s going on in America. That Americans would be so barbaric as to pull a feeding tube out of a person that is lucid and starve them to death for two weeks. I mean, in America that’s going to happen if we don’t win this fight.
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.”
Doctors advised that he would “basically be a vegetable,” said the congressman’s aunt, JoAnne DeLay.
When his father’s kidneys failed, the DeLay family decided against connecting him to a dialysis machine. “Extraordinary measures to prolong life were not initiated,” said his medical report, citing “agreement with the family’s wishes.” His bedside chart carried the instruction: “Do not resuscitate.”
On Dec. 14, 1988, the DeLay patriarch “expired with his family in attendance.”
And there’s more (from the same LAT article):
The family then turned to lawyers. In 1990, the DeLays filed suit against Midcap Bearing Corp. of San Antonio and Lovejoy Inc. of Illinois, the distributor and maker of a coupling that the family said had failed and caused the tram to hurtle out of control.
The family’s wrongful death lawsuit accused the companies of negligence and sought actual and punitive damages. Lawyers for the companies denied the allegations and countersued the surviving designer of the tram system, Jerry DeLay.
The case thrust Rep. DeLay into unfamiliar territory — the front page of a civil complaint as a plaintiff. He is an outspoken defender of business against what he calls the crippling effects of “predatory, self-serving litigation.”
The DeLay family litigation sought unspecified compensation for, among other things, the dead father’s “physical pain and suffering, mental anguish and trauma,” and the mother’s grief, sorrow and loss of companionship. Their lawsuit also alleged violations of the Texas product liability law.
. . .
Rep. DeLay, who since has taken a leading role promoting tort reform, wants to rein in trial lawyers to protect American businesses from what he calls “frivolous, parasitic lawsuits” that raise insurance premiums and “kill jobs.”
March 28th, 2005 at 4:51 pm
Of course there’s no difference between an elderly man on a ventilator and a healthy woman on a feeding tube. You should rename your blog with the title of this post, asshole.
Fuck off.
March 28th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
“A healthy woman on a feeding tube”
There actually is one important difference - one of the people involved in the “act of barbarism” has an (R) by his name.
March 28th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
Joe’s definition of healthy seems at odds with medical facts, but whatever.
I think Delay’s spokesman tried to make the case that the comparison between the two medical events was a false equivalence, but the hypocrisy of the tort reform advocacy and the family lawsuit is certainly true.
March 28th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
So tell me Joe, who pays?
The real issue of hypocrisy here is that Republicans don’t give a shit whether people like Shiavo die or not. Money is far more important to them. This is all fake. All their concerns the who circus is fake.
Unless Joe wants to tell us all how he backs universal