Ponyang Times grasping at straws..

The L.A. Times has a story comparing Tom DeLay's experiences with his ailing father in 1988 with the Terri Schiavo affair. The ever-available organ of the DNC and all-things left-of-center made a lame attempt to brand DeLay as a hypocrite with regard to his family's decision not to resucitate his father, who was seriously injured in a freak accident:

The man in a coma, kept alive by intravenous lines and oxygen equipment, was DeLay's father, Charles Ray DeLay.

Today, as House Majority Leader, DeLay has teamed with his Senate counterpart, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), to champion political intervention in the Schiavo case. They pushed emergency legislation through Congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary.

And DeLay is among the strongest advocates of keeping the woman, who doctors say has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, connected to her feeding tube. DeLay has denounced Schiavo's husband, as well as judges, for committing what he calls "an act of barbarism" in removing the tube.

In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die.

Okay, where is the moral equivalence? Where is the hypocrisy in Delay's current stand on these issues? Delay's father was being kept alive via respirators. His kidneys were shutting down. Terri Schiavo merely needs nutrition and hydration to keep alive, the same as you or I (although Terri's kidneys are no doubt shutting down now due to lack of hydration). But the L.A. times will not rest on mere fact. They go on to try to twist and squirm in an effort to fit a square peg in a round hole:

There were also these similarities: Both stricken patients were severely brain-damaged. Both were incapable of surviving without medical assistance. Both were said to have expressed a desire to be spared from being kept alive by artificial means. And neither of them had a living will.

This previously unpublished account of the majority leader's personal brush with life-ending decisions was assembled from court files, medical records and interviews with family members.

Leave it to the LA Times to try their level best to portray those who stand on the side of life as hypocrites (although there are some real hypocrites at play here). Unfortunately for them, their level-best efforts to propagandize the truth of this situation fall flatter than the state of South Dakota.