The Leadership of Tom DeLay

“I appreciate the leadership of Congressman Tom DeLay, in working on important issues that matter to the country.”

You can just see Bush saying it, can’t you? Slipping into his fake Southern accent, blurring syllables together, suppressing a smirk, struggling to strike the perfect balance between banality and condescension. The statement is meaningless, of course, verbal packing peanuts around the important stuff, the photo op of two stalwart Texans stepping off of Airforce One together, united in their valiant battle against liberalism, gayness, and the ravening forces of anti-theocracy.

But let’s parse the sentence a little anyway.

I appreciate the leadership of Congressman Tom DeLay …

There it is again: appreciate. He’s been using that word in the oddest places for the past four years. What does it mean, exactly? Is he saying that he is personally appreciative of the bugman’s leadership? Or that he appreciates/understands what it takes to be a leader? Or is he verbifying a noun: attempting to appreciate DeLay’s falling stock? Yet another aspect of our President’s unfathomable complexity.

… in working on important issues that matter to the country.

Issues like:

1. The silencing of the pernicious house ethics committee, which dared to slap him gently on the wrist (three separate times) for his wide-ranging ethics violations, the details of which are just coming to light.

2. The right of congress to pass a law targeting a single person, in an attempt to prevent her husband from releasing her from the vegetative purgatory that she’s been in for the past fifteen years, in the process countermanding the orders of every single judicial body who has looked into the case.

3. The responsibility of morally upright majority leaders to obliquely threaten the lives of activist judges who have the temerity not to go along with their hard right-wing agenda.

4. The absolute necessity of people in his position to stay in $700-a-night hotel rooms, in London, in between $5000 games of golf, in the course of a $120,000 trip to hold meetings with very current and extremely relevant “conservative leaders”. Like Margaret Thatcher. And then charge all of it to your scumbag lobbyist buddy’s credit card.

If I were the president of a country, I wouldn’t want to be seen anywhere near this guy.