I really don’t know. Most of the American people don’t know and don’t care. White conservatives love him while liberals, especially non white ones, hate him and want him crucified.
If Tom Delay died of a massive heart attack in a public place with him deficating out his trousers, I would dance a pagan dance of glee. Amen. praise Allah. Buddha is right all along. All the religions would intersect, causing World Peace, just because Congressman Tom died and shitted on his 40 dollar briefs. Fuck him.
An opportunity to burnish my non-partisan credentials, by rising in the defense of Tom DeLay!
Not that bad! And odious, craven, vile, lying pustule on the rectum of the Body Politic, with all the instincts of a rattlesnake, but lacking the warmth.
Yes, outside of that. Because that story shows that the system, as already in place, worked; no need for new laws. Workers mistreated, Labor Department sues of their behalf, owner coughs up record fine, which is actually distributed to aggrived workers.
This is why I brought this incident up a couple of pages ago.
Post #237, as is obvious to the meanest intelligence, was an effort to suggest some support for your previously unsupported conjecture: that poor ol’ Tom was misled by the wily Tans, a “Potemkin village”, I think you called it. And that he had no way of knowing that his statements were the utterest hogwash. Despite the fact that he clearly stated his own personal investigation, and his authoritative conclusions.
Now you want us to re-write the sequence, so that now post #237 is in support of your other unsupported conjecture, that Mr DeLay sincerely believed that laws already in place were sufficient to prevent such future bad behavior. Whch, apparently, they didn’t, but that isn’t your point, is it? Your point is that Mr DeLay might have believed so! In which case, if we stretch our credulity to the breaking point, would introduce the merest, infinitesimal scrap of doubt. We need merely believe that Mr DeLay has the acute intellligence of a bowl of cottage cheese.
Would you be so kind as to clarify which of these arguments you would like to advance? And if you are going to re-write any more of your previous posts, would you do so now?
Apparently, you are operating under the presumption that you have an utterly devestating point to make, just as soon as I admit something about the all-important date of 1997. Something so powerful that, when you pin me to some admission, my argument will be rendered into shards and fragments at a single blast.
Either that, or you’re bluffing. I’m leaning in that direction, for the moment.
So lets cut to the chase, shall we? Why don’t you presume that my answer is…whatever you would prefer. I can’t imagine why that date is so utterly crucial. So why don’t you just tell us what your getting at, here, and leave the dramatic foreshadowing to Perry Mason?
Oh, no you don’t! I know the difference between “prior” and “post”! Just because you may have seen someone with a striking resemblance to George Clooney falling off a turnip truck, doesn’t mean it was me! You’re trying to pull a slow one, well, you got to get up pretty early in the afternoon to fool me!
There’s no “gotcha” here, for a refreshing change, elucidator. This is a simple attrition strategy. He’ll keep responding with nonsense wrapped in high-school debatese until you get tired, just to avoid admitting yet another loss.
And then I asked outside of the previous “conviction” for just this sort of thing. Spoken in sarcasm, of course, which seems to have eluded you. By no stretch of the imagination am I willing to believe that Mr DeLay was entirely unaware of said actions.
As for ongoing “issues”, we can look at this attendance at a gala in Saipan with Mr. Abramoff, Mr Tan, and other worthies celebrating New Years 1997. A fête worse than death, but I digress…
It would be fair to suggest that his attendance means either a)he is unaware that he is supping with slime or b) he wasn’t about to admit it.
It is only after the “investigation” by the radical Trotskyist Mr. Miller that he is moved to his own “investigation”. In which he concludes that Mr. Miller et. al. are full of shit, and no such dreadful circumstances exist.
So even if I grant you his utter ignorance, willful or no, as of a given date, there still remains the issue of his alleged “investigation”. You can believe, if you insist, that the truth is there were no such issues, Mr. DeLay speaks the pure unvarnished truth, that this was all a ghastly scheme to slander the good people of the Mariannas.
So my answer isn’t so much “no” as “meh, who cares?”.
For the life of me, I cannot imagine why you are so anxious to keep alive the slender possibility that Mr DeLay was utterly innocent of any possible sleaze factors in his hosts before 1997. By his own testimony, he heard of such things in 1998, investigated them and offered his investigation as authoritative. So its not ignorance he is claiming, he’s pretty much calling everybody else a liar.
(So I was wrong before, he didn’t tiptoe up to the line of calling Mr. Miller a liar, he flat out said so. I retract, shamefacedly.)
I am not prepared to accept that as fact. If you are so prepared, I can only hope your dear wife has power of attorney as well as power over attorney, otherwise I fear your life savings, your home, and the college tuition of the Brickeritos will soon find their way into the hands of a Nigerian scoundrel.
But if the only way you will ever actually reveal this rhetorical juggernaut which you are threatening to unleash is for me to stipulate he knew nothing prior to 1997, sure, why not?
OK, so, whaddaya got? Give it to me straight, counselor, I can take it.
I’m going to back off my righteous indignation here.
I have spent the last several days trying to find more information on this DeLay legislation deal. It amazes me that there was apparently a decision to dump the bill before a floor vote and not one member in the House said a damn thing about it.
Most especially, I imagined that if I looked hard enough I could find SOME statement by DeLay indicating that he was relying on existing law. He’s not obligated to make such a statement, but in light of the accusations about being in Ambramoff’s pocket, you’d think he’d want to bend over backwards to make clear that the appearance of impropriety was not actual impropriety.
I have actually been through paper microfiche of Congressional reports, since it was not clear to me that on-line sources were complete.
I got nuthin’. Not from DeLay, not from anyone.
So: while I don’t agree DeLay is scum, I am now prepared to agree that a reasonable person, looking at this evidence, could easily reach that conclusion. So I withdraw my objections, and concede defeat on this point.