Report: DeLay Agreed With Withholding Special Treatment for Injured Father – from TBO.com
I’m beginning to think that Repugnicans have some sort of special gene that makes them unable to detect hypocrisy on any level. Because this latest bit of news on Tom DeLay — one of the guys pushing hardest for the Culture of Control in the Terri Schiavo case — shows a complete lack of understanding of the concept.
[Tom DeLay’s father] Charles DeLay, 65, and his brother and their wives were trying out a tram the brothers had built to carry their families up and down a slope from their Texas home to the shore of a lake when the tram jumped the tracks on Nov. 17, 1988.
Charles DeLay was pitched headfirst into a tree. Hospital admission records showed he suffered multiple injuries, including a brain hemorrhage.
Doctors advised that he would “basically be a vegetable,” said the congressman’s aunt, JoAnne DeLay, who suffered broken bones in the crash.
Like Schiavo, Charles DeLay had no living will, but he had reportedly expressed to others his wish not to be kept alive by artificial means.
As the elder DeLay’s vital organs began failing, the family chose not to connect him to a dialysis machine or take other measures to prolong his life, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday, citing court documents, medical records and interviews with family members.
“There was no point to even really talking about it,” Maxine DeLay, the congressman’s 81-year-old mother, told the Times. “Tom knew, we all knew, his father wouldn’t have wanted to live that way.”
“Tom went along” with the family’s decision, she said.
The congressman declined to be interviewed about his father’s case, but a press aide said it was “entirely different than Terri Schiavo’s.”
Uh huh. Entirely different because the DeLay family’s medical decisions are personal and private and have no chance of motivating a rabid anti-abortion base in the 2006 elections.
DeLay’s spokesman goes on to say the cases are different because the elder DeLay needed a ventilator and dialysis as well as a feeding tube, but we all know that’s just a rationalization. If you are on a feeding tube, then you are on life support — without food, you die. I don’t understand why a machine that takes over your breathing or elimination functions is life support, but one that takes over your eating or digestive functions is not. Just like I can’t understand why Maxine DeLay’s handling of her spouse’s medical decisions is sacred, but Michael Schiavo’s handling of his spouse’s medical decisions requires congressional intervention.
