Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

The Seattle Times runs a story originating at the Los Angeles Times.

Here're the lead paragraphs:

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CANYON LAKE, Texas -- A family tragedy unfolding in a Texas hospital in 1988 was a private ordeal -- without judges, emergency sessions of Congress or the raging debate outside Terri Schiavo's Florida hospice.

The patient was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. Among family members standing vigil at Brooke Army Medical Center was a grieving junior congressman -- Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

{snip}

In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric (such as what DeLay has used regarding Terri Schiavo) as the congressman joined the sad family consensus to let his father die.

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As Denis Leary might say, "Whining, fucking, hypocritical, opportunistic maggot."

But wait. There's more. Let's cut down a few paragraphs, where we find this gem:

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On Nov. 17, 1988, Charles DeLay (Tom DeLay's father) and his brother, Jerry DeLay, had just finished work on a new backyard tram -- an elevator-like device to carry passengers from the house down a 200-foot slope to Canyon Lake.

But the tram, on a test run, jumped the track and slammed into a tree, scattering passengers and twisted debris.

{snip}

Charles Ray DeLay died at 3:17 a.m., his death certificate says, 27 days after the accident.

The family then turned to lawyers. A wrongful-death suit against the distributor and maker of a coupling that the DeLays said caused the tram to hurtle out of control thrust the congressman into decidedly unfamiliar territory. He since has taken a leading role in reining in trial lawyers to protect business from what he calls "frivolous, parasitic lawsuits" that raise insurance premiums and "kill jobs."

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Yup. It's fairly clear that, for Tom DeLay, the Golden Rule is for "the little people."