Truth - Al Franken [64]
“Tom knew—we all knew—his father wouldn’t have wanted to live that way,” Tom’s mother, Maxine DeLay, told the Times. The family decided not to connect Charles to a dialysis machine, and he passed away on December 14, 1988, with his family by his side.
In marked contrast to the Schiavo case, Tom DeLay never accused the DeLay family of “an act of barbarism,” “medical terrorism,” “murder,” or “homicide.” He did, however, join his family’s lawsuit against the maker and the distributor of a faulty coupling that had contributed to the accident. The lawsuit was settled in 1993 for $250,000, and Tom signed over his portion to his mother.
Three years later, DeLay cosponsored a bill to override state product liability laws like the one cited in DeLay v. Midcap Bearing Corp. and Love-joy Inc., part of his career-long campaign to defend corporations from “predatory, self-serving litigation” brought by trial lawyers who “get fat off the pain” of plaintiffs and the “hard work” of defendants. These “frivolous, parasitic lawsuits” had to stop.
Thankfully, President Clinton vetoed the bill. He said it “tilts against American families and would deprive them of the ability to recover fully when they are injured by a defective product,” like a home-built backyard tram.
A million questions must be running through your head after reading this chapter. Were Tom DeLay and his allies in Congress and the White House as hypocritical as it seemed? Did they really care about the fate of Theresa Marie Schiavo? Or did Brian Darling and 82 percent of America have it right—that this was just about advancing a political agenda? About paying off the grassroots activists that they thought had won them the election?
Did they actually care about anything other than staying in power? Were they sincere about their commitment to a culture of life even when the cameras weren’t rolling? Or were they, for all their bluster about the sanctity of the unborn and the unconscious, just hypocrites—big, fat hypocrites who, if the price were right, wouldn’t hesitate to sell out every principle they claimed to be fighting for?
My research indicates that the answers are, respectively: yes, no, yes, yes, no, no—and, on that last question, more than you could ever, ever imagine.
10 The Tom DeLay Saipan Sex Tour and Jack Abramoff Casino Getaway
I need a break.
Making jokes about Terri Schiavo is one of the hardest things I have to do as a humorist. And I bet you could use a breather, too. Not from my “entertaining and powerful” book (reviewers, take note), but from the avalanche of political sludge set off by the falling snowflake of the Schiavo tragedy. So let’s take a trip, somewhere warm. But not to a foreign country where people don’t share our American values and might try to cheat us when we purchase a souvenir. No, let’s go to one of the less-traveled byways in America: the remote South Pacific island of Saipan.
You may have heard of Saipan from its key role in the Greatest Generation’s victory over Japan in World War II.1 In June of 1944, 3,100 U.S. Marines died in the desperate eleven-day battle for the island, giving their lives to defend America’s freedom and American values. Saipan became a staging ground for B-29 bomber runs against Tokyo. After the war ended with mysterious abruptness on August 14, 1945, Saipan became a United Nations trust territory, administered by the United States. By 1986, Saipan and its neighbors became the American Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and their indigenous peoples were granted U.S. citizenship.
These days, Saipan is a tourist destination renowned for its turquoise waters, balmy breezes, white-sand beaches, and hiking and snorkeling. And golf.
But this island paradise is no island paradise. While most U.S. laws apply in the Commonwealth