Remember when Republicans belittled working class Americans by inventing the idea, compassionate conservative, to hide the great money grab of election year 2000. Well, no one exemplifies Republican disdain for working class Americans better than Tom Delay.
Who can forget - or forgive - DeLay’s degradation of working folks in the Congressional Record! "Emotional appeals,” Delay pontificated, “about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist." (1996 April 23 Congressional Record, H3706). Right…
"The trouble with the world,” Mark Twain keenly observed, “is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so." And, Delay’s pontification was one of the “many things that ain’t so." Raising minimum wage, which Delay opposed, rescued hundreds of thousands from poverty, many of them kids.
But then, no one really understood the depth of Republican vulgarity, until Pres. Bush identified “compassionate conservatives” as the “haves and have more.” Delay is one of the “haves and have more,” who has lived the good-life so well and so long, we really can’t fault him for not knowing that millions of Americans can’t survive on minimum wage.
The Associated Press reports that public records show that bon vivant, DeLay, could never survive on minimum wage:
While most people scrape to live on minimum wage, DeLay and his buddies lived very well at the Republican hog-trough. Here are a few of Delay’s favorite “wine & dine” locations. Follow the link and vicariously savor the Delay delights:
Palmas del Mar (Caribbean),
Ritz-Carlton (Jamaica);
Baltusrol Golf Club, Springfield, N.J.;
Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, Farmington, Pa., and
Harbour Town Golf Links, Hilton Head Island, S.C.
So how much did our epicurean, Tom Delay, pay for his opulent lifestyle? According to The Associated Press, nothing! Political donors, even a children’s charity, picked up the tab:
“Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants — all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.…Instead of his personal expense, the meals and trips for DeLay and his associates were paid with donations collected by the campaign committees, political action committees and children's charity the Texas Republican created during his rise to the top of Congress.”
Paying nothing? Well that’s about as conservative as one can get. But, fleecing working folks and a children’s charity is anything but compassionate!
12/20/05
posted by Anthony Fazzio at 9:57 PM
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