Taking down Tom DeLay’s Ornaments
Tom DeLay has now departed the House of Representatives — presumably into the Shadow Government of Lobbyists after his detour through the Court System with the money he raised obstensibly for the purposes of a campaign he never intended on running but now diverted to his attorney fees. Maybe it’s a victory for Libertarians — as per his famous assertion that “I am the federal government”.
But now that he is leaving, it make sense to go ahead and take down certain ornaments he left behind. In this case, um… Washington State’s Fourth Congressional District Representative Richard “Doc” Hastings‘s place as chairmanship on the Ethics Committee, a farce if there ever was one.
Actually, Doc Hastings and the Ethics Committee has a full caseload on the docket. He’s looking into the improprieties of… um… Jim McDermott. Granted, I’m not fully cognicient of Jim McDermott’s case, but in partisan terms at its worse the biblical standard is at play of “Take The Log Out Of Your Own Eye Before You Complain About The Mote In Someone Else’s Eye”. And a mighty lame mote that is.
In addition to Jim McDermott, we have this curiosity:
This week, DeLay told conservative publication Human Events that he is considering filing an ethics complaint against Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., for striking a Capitol Police officer.
A mighty kidder, that Tom DeLay. See — it was an ethics complaint by an outgoing Congressman, breaking the unspoken agreement among the parties to not use the Ethics Committee, that brought the John Hefley – chaired committee to admonish DeLay in the first plac e– at which point Hefley was summarily dismissed by DeLay and replaced by … Doc Hastings.
While I cannot condone what Cynthia McKinney did — assuming the worst for her, her case does not fall under the umbrella of Congressional Ethics. Ethics of a sort, I suppose, and the channels that are dealing with her meelee are through the Capitol Hill Police. Congressional Ethics involves the, quote-in-quote “People’s Business”, which is to say Corruption. The tradtional definition of which is, and you only modify it slightly, “use of public means for private gains.” Tom DeLay’s McKinney venture is a portal into his vindictive mind.
I guess there are some 200 other Democrats with trivial infractions that the Ethics Committee can investigate. That Representative Delegate from the Virgin Islands, who is not allowed to vote… maybe someone bribed her to make one of her unlistened to and ignored pitches on behalf of Virgin Island’s Freedom?