SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON TOM DELAY….A few commenters last night wondered if the Tom DeLay quote that I posted was real. After a bit of checking, my guess is that it’s not. Rather, it’s a paraphrase of a longer and even more addlepated rant. Here it is, straight from the Congressional Record four weeks after the Columbine shootings:
Every once in a while, I read something or hear something that blows away all that smoke that clouds a particular issue. A letter written by a Mr. Addison Dawson to the San Angelo Standard-Times is just such a statement….The following is Mr. Dawson’s letter:
For the life of me, I can’t understand what could have gone wrong in Littleton, Colorado. If only the parents had kept their children away from the guns, we wouldn’t have had such a tragedy. Yeah, it must have been the guns.
….It couldn’t have been because we place our children in day care centers where they learn their socialization skills among their peers under the law of the jungle, while employees who have no vested interest in the children look on and make sure that no blood is spilled.
….It couldn’t have been because we have sterilized and contracepted our families down to sizes so small that the children we do have are so spoiled with material things that they come to equate the receiving of the material with love.
….It couldn’t have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.
….Nah, it must have been the guns.
Yes indeed, back in the halcyon days of 1999 this was the sort of thing that The Hammer hailed as the kind of piercing social analysis that “blows away all that smoke.” There’s more along the same lines, but I only included the sections about guns, day care, birth control, and evolution. I left out the parts about broken homes, television, video games, children as pets, pets as children, moral relativism, and Bill Clinton. I also left out Barney Frank’s longsuffering reply. Read the whole thing if you dare.
