Tom DeLay Pulls Daddy's Plug
Hip, hip, hip-ocracy, whaddya know, in the US Senate again. It's Tom DeLay, of course, the man who was quick to agree to pull the plug on his daddy -- probably because daddy was a man, not a cause, to him. William Saletan draws on the story pieced together from by Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek for the LA Times:

Physically, Charles DeLay was in far worse shape than Terri Schiavo. He needed dialysis, not just nutrition. He was 65, not 41. His body, unlike hers, was failing. But mentally, his condition was similar. According to his sister-in-law, doctors told the family that Charles DeLay would "basically be a vegetable." A neighbor who had visited him in the hospital said he "did a bit of moaning and groaning, I guess, but you could see there was no way he was coming back." Tom DeLay's mother told the Times that her husband seemed unconscious except that "whenever Randy [his son] walked into the room, his heart, his pulse rate, would go up a little bit."

Friends and relatives considered Charles DeLay's quality of life and concluded he'd be better off dead. "He was all but gone," said the neighbor. "He would have been better off if he'd died right there and then." According to Charles' sister-in-law, his brother "prayed that, if [Charles] couldn't have quality of life, that God would take him—and that is exactly what [H]e did."

God may have taken Charles, but his family held the door open. They inferred, without written evidence, that Charles wouldn't have wanted to go on living in this condition. "Daddy did not want to be a vegetable," said Vi Skogen, who at the time was Charles' daughter-in-law. Tom DeLay's mother told the Times, "There was no point to even really talking about it. 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."

That was then. This is now. At a press conference on March 18, Tom DeLay denied that quality of life could be valid grounds for withdrawing Schiavo's feeding tube. "It's not for any one of us to decide what her quality of life should be," he said. "It's not any one of us to decide whether she should live or die." Congress, DeLay explained, was intervening against Schiavo's husband "to protect her constitutional right to live."

...Why the difference between then and now? Maybe because DeLay saw his father as a human being. He speaks of Schiavo as something more—and less. "It's more than just Terri Schiavo," DeLay told the Family Research Council on March 18. "It is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight the fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America."