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My Letter from an Indicted Felon
Now that I’m through the mid-term of my professional certification course, I have a brief moment on the train to NYC (while also keeping an eye on strollers, backpacks, and briefcases) to reflect on how, the very same day I heard about the felony indictment of Tom DeLay, I received my very first letter from him. It was from something called the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the major distinguishing feature was an “every member canvass.” This was an 18 question survey of what members of the Republican party wanted of their Congressional delegation. It was “not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee,” a legalistic statement which likely allows this canvassing of contributions to skirt some legal restriction in the manner we’ve come to expect of Mr. DeLay. (BTW, just to dispel any possible confusion, there is absolutely no reason for me to be on a right-wing mailing list, other than that one of my fellow Academy graduates has fed them the contents of the Register. Sadly, it’s probably a productive list for them. By “sadly” I mean sad for the country that these graduates once swore to protect and defend.) A most striking aspect of Tom’s letter was its focus on fluff rather than substantive issues. Over and over, it used the Right Wing’s code word for fluff: “values.” Here’s an example: “The liberal media woke up and finally realized that much of our success at the polls in November was because of values issues. Do you want us to concentrate even more on moral, family and values issues during this session of Congress than we did during the previous one?.” Not that “values” was the sole focus. He who recently said that government spending had already been cut as much as it could, and is doubtless aware that his House is holding open the purse strings for hundreds of billions of annual deficits, now composes a questionnaire in which the only item CAPITALIZED is the following: “Do you support our Republican insistence that making the recent tax cuts PERMANENT is the best way to ensure that America’s families, seniors, hard working job holders and small business owners can keep more of their hard-earned dollars?” He conveniently fails to note that it will be fat-cat Republican campaign contributors who will be keeping most of the hard-earned dollars the Treasury won’t be getting. In any case, what kind of “values” is he demonstrating to the babies he claims to care so much for in another question, when these “values” are the inevitable cause of a debt these babies will someday be faced with repaying?
10.07.05 @ 09:11 PM EDT [link]