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Posted by Doped on Jesus Christ (Guest) - Sunday, October 24 2004, 22:53:30 (CEST)
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'The Hammer: Tom Delay-- God, Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress' by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid

All the far-right moves: Texan Tom DeLay's fervor seizes power for Republicans and attracts investigations
Sunday, October 03, 2004

By Elizabeth Bennett



Tom DeLay, the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, has always been a controversial figure in Texas.

Nicknamed "The Hammer" for his use of brute political force, he relentlessly pushes his pro-business, pro-Jesus, anti-government and anti-environment agenda.

He was never well-known outside his home state and Washington political circles, but suddenly, DeLay's name is popping up in news stories all over the country.

Late last month, three of his close political associates and eight companies were indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money to help elect Republicans in Texas.

The indictments follow a complaint filed in June with the U.S. House Ethics Committee against DeLay, alleging criminal conspiracy, abuse of power and misusing government funds against Democrats.

And now comes this hard-hitting biography by investigative reporters Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, who have followed DeLay's career since his early days in the Texas Legislature.

They paint a frightening picture of one of the most powerful figures in America, a politician who considers himself God's man in Congress and who has turned the U.S. House into a single-party operation.

As Dubose and Reid tell the story, DeLay has come a long way from Laredo, where he was born in 1947 and grew up in an exceptionally dysfunctional family. He once described his father as "a boisterous, domineering alcoholic" and brother Ray as "a real skid-row type."

He attended Baylor, the elite Baptist university in Texas, where he made good grades but was a hell-raiser and failed to graduate. Instead, he married Christine, his high school sweetheart, finished college at the University of Houston -- avoiding military service and Vietnam with student deferments -- and got a job with a Houston pest control company.

He would own several of his own exterminating firms before deciding, at 31, to get into politics, first as a conservative member of the Texas Legislature, where he was a hard-drinking, "hedonistic back-bencher," and later as an even more hedonistic U.S. representative.

Then he found religion after watching a video by the Christian Right's Focus on the Family guru, James Dobson. Today, write Dubose and Reid, the Texas legislator is a born-again Christian, and his faith has made him "a vastly more effective politician."

His timing was also extraordinary, they point out:

"As he converted to fundamentalist Christianity, the country was converting with him, in a second Great Awakening of evangelical fervor. ... Like George W. Bush, DeLay found Jesus at the precise moment in American political history when Jesus became a political asset."

"The Hammer" covers all the major steps of DeLay's amazing career: His rise through the House ranks; the building of a fund-raising operation and how he seized control of lobbyists to do the GOP's bidding; his efforts to impeach Bill Clinton; and his dedication to fighting all forms of government regulation.

DeLay once called the Environmental Protection Agency "the Gestapo of government" and led the fight to drill oil in the Arctic National Wildfire Refuge, in the Great Lakes and off the coast of Florida. He also voted against protecting water from mining companies and stricter standards for arsenic in drinking water.

Some of the most startling material in the book -- startling because of its sheer boldness -- covers his fund-raising schemes.

It details how DeLay mastered the loopholes and evasions of campaign finance law and harnessed the political power of the evangelical movement.

By 2003, his various fund-raising enterprises were bringing in a staggering $12,785 a day, the authors claim. And before Enron collapsed, it had contributed $500,000 to ARMPAC (Americans for a Republican Majority, a political action committee established by DeLay).

That money, say Dubose and Reid, was used to help elect Republicans across the country, including Texas, where Republicans have taken control of the Texas House for the first time since Reconstruction.

But while Texas is still "the Wild West of campaign finance," Texas law makes it a felony to spend corporate money on election campaigns.

A crusading district attorney in Austin, the state capital, is looking into DeLay's involvement in all that money.

"The Hammer" is not easy reading, mainly because of the complicated material the authors cover. And the authors' overuse of such expressions as "pissing match" and "as full of s--- as a Christmas turkey" is irritating.

But Dubose, a former editor of The Texas Observer and co-author of two recent books on George W. Bush, and Reid, a senior writer for Texas Monthly and an award-winning novelist, have written an important book.

It's an eye-opening look at how extreme right-wing political views are seeping into our culture and affecting our lives.



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