by Molly Ivins
Naturally, this made Timerman, the lifelong Zionist, highly unpopular in Israel. He left the country.
Timerman also had a cameo role in American politics. The pro-Israeli magazine The New Republic attacked him for The Longest War, and even before he went to Israel, the neoconservative intellectuals, in a most despicable episode, tried to destroy his reputation.
Christopher Hitchens of The Nation once heard Irving Kristol, editor of the right-wing Commentary, say that Timerman had made up the entire story of his imprisonment and torture—that it had never happened. This was after Timerman’s testimony had destroyed the nomination of Ernest Lefever to be President Reagan’s point man on human rights. Lefever so patently did not care about human rights that the nomination was offensive to the point of being obscene.
At the time, the Reaganites, who disliked Carter’s policy of emphasizing human rights, were advancing a peculiar theory that torture and oppression by left-wing or “totalitarian” regimes were evil but that torture and oppression by right-wing or “authoritarian” regimes were somehow forgivable. It was not known at the time, but the Argentine junta had a contract to train the Nicaraguan contras being supported by the Reagan administration. In a memorable appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Timerman quietly noted that when you are being tortured, it really doesn’t make much difference to you what the politics of your torturers are.
Timerman’s devotion to human rights, unlike that of some Americans, was never swayed by his political perspective. He often attacked the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. His book Cuba: A Journey contains, among other things, a brilliant attack on Gabriel García Márquez, the respected left-wing writer who has been notably uncritical of Castro.
What a record, what a life. Go with God, brave fighter.
November 1999
Tom DeLay I
AFTER KENNETH STARR, the man most responsible for the impeachment of President Clinton was House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a Texan best known for campaign fund-raising techniques that smack of extortion and political judgments based exclusively on radical right-wing passions.
Were it not for DeLay, Clinton almost surely would have been censured late last year and the case would have been closed. But DeLay wanted nothing less than Clinton’s expulsion, to say nothing of prolonging Washington’s tawdry morality play. After all, in terms of political advancement and consolidation of personal power, the former bug exterminator is probably the biggest winner in Washington.
No matter what the fallout from the impeachment process, most observers think there is little chance that the power DeLay had before it started will be diminished, at least in the immediate future. And chances are he will never stop trying to triumph over the president.
He knew how to win during the impeachment debate last fall. In public, DeLay said GOP congressmen were free to vote their consciences. But his colleagues had no doubt about how he wanted them to behave, nor of the punishment that awaited them if they did otherwise. They knew that the man who wants to restore DDT to the American landscape, and who treats the Constitution like a bug, has the power to cut off their political funding.
For his part, DeLay talked about “secret evidence,” which turned out to be a rumor that Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances to a woman twenty years ago. The woman in question has told conflicting versions of the episode. In mid-February she recanted her earlier denials that Clinton had misbehaved.
After the impeachment vote, DeLay issued a statement saying a censure vote could never have succeeded because “the White House will never negotiate in good faith.” Then he went back to his discredited secret evidence and urged senators to examine what he called the “reams of evidence that have not been publicly aired and are available only to members.”
DeLay, fifty-two, is a somewhat beefy-faced fellow with a helmet of perfectly groomed dark hair. He’s normally genial, with the air of a small-town car dealer experienced at being professionally affable. He and his wife of thirty-one years, Christine, have a daughter, Danielle, and two foster children. When DeLay is not angry, he comes across not as a nut but as a man given to ill-advised enthusiasms—such as bringing back DDT. Nothing, however, in his manner or conversation would lead you to think he is a natural leader.
The son of an oil field–drilling contractor, he grew up in Texas and spent part of his childhood in Venezuela. He graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and went to work for a pesticide company. Several years later DeLay bought his own outfit, Albo Pest Control, which he boasts was the “Cadillac of exterminators” in Houston.
He ran for the Texas Legislature in 1978 because he was upset about government regulation of pesticides and how much it was costing him. “Dereg” has been his slogan ever since. One colleague has said DeLay wasn’t “a player” in the Legislature and was neither a Goody Two-shoes nor a raving ideologue.
In 1984 he ran for Congress from a district on the Gulf Coast, part of a region that boasts more than half of the nation’s petrochemical production and one fourth its oil-refining capacity.
In his early years in Congress, DeLay tended to keep his bizarre views out of the headlines. But in 1988 one of his barmier moments occurred in public. According to the Houston Press, DeLay gave an impassioned defense of Dan Quayle, who was then under fire for using family ties to get into a National Guard unit and out of serving in Vietnam. DeLay explained to reporters a theretofore little-noted phenomenon. DeLay claimed there was no room in the army for people like himself and Quayle because so many minority youths had gone into uniform to escape poverty and the ghetto. This remarkable explanation left his audience dumbfounded. After DeLay left the microphone, a television reporter asked, “Who was that idiot?”
In 1994 DeLay started his own political action committee, called Americans for a Republican Majority, and a “corporate alliance” called Project Relief, composed mostly of lobbyists who wanted relief from government regulations. According to the Federal Election Commission, DeLay received more contributions from PACs than any Republican other than Newt Gingrich in the 1996 campaign. The money lobbyists give to Armpac is in turn distributed to Republican candidates, who then owe DeLay both votes and loyalty. His contributions to the famous class of Republican freshmen in 1994 enabled him to win his race for majority whip by three votes.
During the 1995 budget crisis, DeLay was instrumental in getting Gingrich to close the government. “Screw the Senate. It’s time for all-out war,” he said. Then, when Gingrich decided to cut a deal with Clinton, DeLay led an unsuccessful rebellion against Gingrich. Republicans, including DeLay, contended that Clinton had blindsided them by going on television to attack the party minutes after they thought they had a deal. DeLay never trusted him again: “I don’t believe a word he says.” Despite the hideous drubbing that Republicans took in the polls, DeLay still says, “Our biggest mistake was backing off from the government shutdown. We should have stuck it out.”
In 1996 DeLay reacted to Clinton’s State of the Union address with rage. Asked by a reporter if he had liked any part of the speech, DeLay bellowed, “Are you kidding! I was so shocked I couldn’t even boo. I’ve never seen such a performance. I got knots in my stomach watching the president of the United States look straight into the eyes of the American people and lie. I have already counted twenty-one lies, and I didn’t even have an advance copy of the speech.” Eventually, DeLay claimed to have found forty-seven lies but the State of the Union address faded from the news.
TOM DELAY’S power may continue to grow, but there is no question that his ludicrous political judgments have made him vulnerable. He is, after all, seen as the man largely responsible for giving the Republican revolution its image as mean, radically extreme, and in bed with corporate special interests. He not only favored the folly of shutting down the federal government in 1995 but is almost solely responsible for the widespread impression that Republicans are out to gut every environmental protection law ever passed.
On t
he House floor DeLay described the Environmental Protection Agency as “the Gestapo of government, purely and simply . . . one of the major claw hooks that the government maintains on the backs of our constituents.” He introduced bills to destroy both the Clean Air and the Clean Water acts, and let lobbyists help him draft legislation calling for a moratorium on federal regulations. According to their own pollsters, this anti-environmental image has cost the party dearly.
DeLay’s anti-environmental passions go back to his days as a bug exterminator in Houston, when he came to admire DDT. He believes the forbidden poison is a benign substance that should be in use today, and also believes the pesticides mirex and chlordane should be brought back. The EPA says mirex and chlordane are both dangerous to human health: Mirex is cited as a possible carcinogen and was found in breast milk all over the South in the seventies. DeLay claims that the EPA’s ban on mirex caused fire ants to spread throughout the South.
DeLay also dismisses evidence linking chlorofluorocarbons to destruction of the ozone layer. When the three scientists who discovered the link were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995, DeLay sneeringly called it “the Nobel appeasement prize.” DeLay does not believe in acid rain: He holds that the acid ruining Northeastern lakes is in the soil, and he suggests adding lime. He does not believe in global warming either: “It’s the arrogance of man to think that man can change the climate of the world. Only nature can change the climate. A volcano, for instance.”
DeLay’s normal fare is hyperbole. He once described the Democrats’ constituents as “Greenpeace, Queer Nation and the National Education Association.” But then he also told The New Republic that he was proud of his own coalition, “all kinds of people, from the Christian Coalition to the Eagle Forum, from Arco to Exxon.”
His real constituency is the lobbying corps, and the sleazy smell that rises from their vigorous cooperation is another reason for DeLay’s vulnerability. His motto is blunt: “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules.” DeLay’s rules are upfront, apparent to anyone who cares to look. On his desk he keeps a list of the four hundred largest political action committees and the amounts and percentages they’ve contributed to Republicans and Democrats. Those committees that have given heavily to the GOP are labeled “friendly,” the others “unfriendly.” He also pressures corporations and trade groups to fire Democrats and hire Republicans as their lobbyists. Says DeLay, “We’re just following the adage of punish your enemies and reward your friends. We don’t like to deal with people who are trying to kill the revolution. We know who they are. The word is out.” His fund-raising letters to lobbyists are blunt enough to help earn him the nickname the Hammer.
In late 1995 The Washington Post reported on DeLay’s “friendly” and “unfriendly” lists, and soon after, Ralph Nader’s Congressional Accountability Project began an investigation. In September 1996 CAP director Gary Ruskin asked the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to investigate possible violations of standards of congressional conduct by DeLay. Citing the lists, Ruskin suggested DeLay may have directly linked campaign contributions to official action, in violation of the House rule barring “considerations such as political support, party affiliation or campaign contributions” from affecting “either the decision of a member to provide assistance, or the quality of the help that is given.”
Ruskin also raised questions about DeLay’s brother Randy, who practiced law by himself in Houston until Tom got elected majority whip. Randy promptly became a registered foreign lobbyist and in one year (according to federal records) banked more than $550,000. Along the way, Randy appears to have lobbied his brother on behalf of his clients—and gotten results.
The “vigorous assistance by Representative DeLay in support of the efforts of his lobbyist brother produces the clear impression,” said Gary Ruskin, “that Representative DeLay has provided special and inappropriate political favors to his brother and to Cemex,” a Mexican cement manufacturer. Citing other cases in which the DeLay brothers had worked for the same goal, Ruskin suggested that the whip’s actions may have violated the Code of Ethics for Government Service that says no one in government should “discriminate unfairly by the dispensing of special favors or privileges to anyone.”
DeLay was undeterred, and eventually the House Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint. The Committee did advise him it was “particularly important” for a person in his position to avoid any hint that a “request for access or for official action” was linked to campaign contributions.
Then, during the Senate trial, there were headlines concerning allegations that DeLay had not told the truth five years ago in a deposition regarding a business dispute with a former associate in the pest-control business. DeLay testified under oath that he had not been involved with the company for two or three years, even though he filed congressional financial disclosure forms saying otherwise. An aide tried to squelch the stories, blaming “political enemies” and asserting that “eventually the truth will come out.”
For all his bluster, DeLay appears to have used “legalese and lawyerese to do two-steps around the questions.” Those words, ironically, are his own: He uttered them in denouncing President Clinton for allegedly trying to evade the truth. No matter how the various cases play out, DeLay has certainly made himself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.
WHEN DELAY sees an opponent, his instinct is to get rid of him. In 1997 he attacked federal judges who had made rulings that annoyed him and declared his intention to impeach them. “As part of our conservative efforts against judicial activism, we are going after judges,” he said. “We intend to . . . go after them in a big way.” DeLay never mentioned criminal conduct as grounds for impeachment, except insofar as he regarded political views other than his own as criminal. His efforts were so outrageous that even fellow right-wingers opposed his plans.
DeLay may be more sensitive about his vulnerability than his “acid tongue” and “penchant for rhetorical excess,” to cite two euphemisms from the press about him, suggest. In April 1997 Wisconsin Representative David Obey brandished what was by then a two-year-old Washington Post article describing how lobbyists wrote drafts of legislation with DeLay’s help. DeLay denied “categorically that it ever happened” and challenged Obey to identify the participants. When Obey waved the article under DeLay’s nose, DeLay shoved him and called him a “gutless chickenshit.”
After the shoving incident, DeLay’s spokesman said, “The reason Mr. DeLay was upset was that Obey . . . had questioned his integrity.” DeLay ought to be used to that by now.
Last summer, during the House’s struggle over campaign finance reform, DeLay was the point man for anti-reformers. Day after day he stood in the well, using every parliamentary advantage leadership gives to kill the reform. A majority of House members ultimately voted for it anyway.
“Most Americans deplore what Larry Flynt is doing and at the same time hope he comes up with something truly dreadful on Tom DeLay,” satirist Calvin Trillin observed. Probably true. DeLay may turn out to have been the wrong man at the wrong time for his own cause. He was, after all, an adequate number two when Newt Gingrich’s departure left a vacuum in GOP leadership. DeLay had no hesitation about stepping into the vacuum—and recklessly taking the party over a cliff by identifying the unpopular impeachment process with the Republican Party. Will voters get even in 2000? DeLay seems heedless of the risks and ever more consumed by his desire to punish Bill Clinton. He’s laughing now, but maybe not last.
May 1999
Tom DeLay II
TORONTO — oh, no, how embarrassing. Here I am, visiting the neighbors, who inquire—in their calm, polite, rational, Canadian way—if I could possibly explain for them . . .
Being Canadian is like living next door to the Simpsons. Here are all these patient, sensible, kind people (I swear, their real national motto is “Now, let’s not get excited”) living right next to “the States,” where some hideously noisy psychod
rama is always going on.
Although I have yet to encounter a Canadian who will say so in as many words—they are well-mannered folk—they clearly think we have gone completely around the twist this time.
“Could you explain,” asked a gentleman from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., “this congressman—is it DeHay?”
“DeLay,” I replied with morbid presentiment.
“Yes, Congressman DeLay of your state of Texas.”
Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say. Really, really hard. Our Man DeLay, the former bug exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, has recently distinguished himself by attacking President Clinton for having expressed regret about America’s role in the slave trade and for having apologized for sitting by while genocide occurred in Rwanda, the latter event having occurred on Clinton’s watch.
Said DeLay of Clinton, according to The New York Times: “Here’s a flower child with gray hairs doing exactly what he did back in the sixties: He is apologizing for the actions of the United States wherever he went. It just offends me that the president of the United States is directly or indirectly attacking his own country in a foreign land. It just amazes me.”