Workin' Man

Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay on CNN's "State Of The Nation":
Host Candy Crowley: Congressman, that's a hard sell, isn't it?
Delay: It's the truth.
Crowley: People are unemployed because they want to be?
Delay: well, it is the truth. and people in the real world know it. And they have friends and they know it. Sure, we ought to be helping people that are unemployed find a job, but we also have budget considerations that are incredibly important, especially now that Obama is spending monies that we don't have.
It's a pretty familiar piece of rhetoric from a Republican, but becomes more intriguing as one examines the first word in the man's title: Former. In 2005, a Texas court charged DeLay with criminal violations of state campaign finance laws and money laundering. That's when he left his job, or it left him, depending on where you happened to be standing. The good news, hypocritically speaking, is that Tom hasn't been out of work for long. He's stayed busy writing books, campaigning for others, and Dancing with the Stars.
As long as there are TV shows on which he can show off his rhetoric or his footwork, he will continue to be a useful, hard-working member of our society. The problem is, sometimes those two elements get mixed up, and he ends up with his foot squarely in his mouth. Somebody please give this guy a real job.