Tom DeLay the Vegetable

March 24th, 2005 at 21:46 Björn Hallberg

Via Michael Moore. Time has a transcript of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s speech at the Family Research Council, Washington last Friday. Rated R for strong partisanship, agitation, fretting.

One can only hope this man is not entirely representative for the American right. Except for totally exploiting the Schiavo case, DeLay also turns to religious inconsistencies, accuses the opposition of being "frivolous" and implies that it’s all a big liberal conspiracy. Effectively turning political debate into a farce and reducing any constitutionalism that is left within the system to emotionally oversimplistic questions of us and them (and him). Suffice it to say, this is a man who is certifiable. Rebutting his speech would entail analysing the discourse character by character and an asbestos suit.

Another issue is whether he really believes in what he is saying. At any rate, he doesn’t seem like the ideal neo-conservative. Low on ideology and vision but high on spirit and belief. More like a populist sturmarbeiteilung that actually believes the lies of the propaganda machine and as such is able to relay them with great confidence and credibility.

It is nevertheless amusing that DeLay makes far reaching comparisons between his own case, the case of conservatism and Terri Schiavo. Does that mean that he’s saying that conservatism has in fact been brain dead for the last 15 years and been on a feeding tube of phantom enemies after the largely made-up Cold War has finally faded into oblivion. Interesting case. If so, is it not time to remove that feeding tube and let them rest in peace.

Entry 63 filed under: North America. This entry was posted 3 years, 9 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.