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David Manning Trivial Liars of the Month for March 2005
Eventually, and perhaps pretty soon, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethical
"lapses" (a euphemism for "Ethics? What are ethics?") will
knock him out of the GOP leadership and perhaps out of Congress altogether. In
the meantime, he will remain an irritant to the Ethics Scoreboard because his
schemes, scams, obfuscations and Machiavellian maneuverings create an almost daily
quandary: is it time for yet another Tom DeLay article? But his continued tenure
as the Least Ethical Republican Leader (which is like being the Most Clueless
Democratic Leader) has the more serious side-effect of making DeLay's Congrssional
allies look just as sleazy as he is. Thus poor Dennis Hastert has earned the title
of March's Trivial Liar, and all in the misguided (and, it says here, ultimately
futile) effort to keep the Texas Congressman from the fate he so richly deserves. To pick up the thread of this sordid tale: DeLay's unethical shenanigans finally
became too much to bear even for the somnolent House Ethics Committee, which admonished
him on three clear violations last year. This prompted DeLay to get his party
to sack the Committee's GOP chair, and to pack the committee with three DeLay
cronies. But even that wasn't enough: the GOP leadership also rammed through a
series of Committee rule changes to make it harder to bring down the Majority
Leader on an ethics charge, though they chickened out of their most audacious
change, elimination of the House rule that requires indicted party leaders to
step down from their Congressional posts (a Texas DA is closing in on DeLay's
campaign tricks.) The Democrats, in the minority, couldn't do anything to stop all this; in fact,
the GOP leadership drafted the new rules in secret, according to the Washington
Post, without any Democratic input. So the Democrats have boycotted the Ethics
Committee, essentially rendering it dead in the water (as opposed to its usual
state which is swamped, loaded with bilge, and aimlessly drifting.) Speaker Hastert's official response to this (let me get this out before I start
giggling uncontrollably) was that it is an example of the Congressional
Democrats unwillingness to "put the ethics process above partisan
politics." Having met the David Manning Trivial Lair criteria of generating a lie
so obvious, silly, and pointless that nobody with two neurons firing could
possibly believe it, Dennis Hastert is, beyond a doubt, a Trivial
Liar. And Tom DeLay is definitely not worth it. I'm going to start my giggling now…
