>Article written by Tim Fleck with the Houston Press. FoE Action
>thanks Tim Fleck and the Houston Press for permission to reprint
>this excerpt.
>
>DeLay has risen in the exterminator ranks.
>
>Excerpt from Houston Press Article, January 7 - 13, 1999 edition
>
>"...[DeLay] had graduated from the University of Houston at the
>height of the Vietnam conflict in 1970, but chose to enlist in the
>war on cockroaches, fleas and termites as the owner of an
>exterminator business, rather than going off to battle against the
>Vietcong. He and Quayle, DeLay explained to the assembled media in
>New Orleans, were victims of an unusual phenomenon back in the days
>of the undeclared Southeast Asian war. So many minority youths had
>volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty
>and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks
>like himself. Satisfied with the pronouncement, which dumbfounded
>more than a few of his listeners who had lived the sixties, DeLay
>marched off to the convention.
>
>"Who was that idiot?" asked a TV reporter who arrived at the end of
>the media show. When he was told the name, it drew a blank. DeLay at
>that time was a national nobody, and his claim that blacks and
>browns crowded him and other good conservatives out of Vietnam
>seemed so outlandish and self-serving that no one bothered to file a
>news report on the congressman's remarks.
>
>A lot has changed -- and remained the same -- for Tom Delay over the
>succeeding decade. He still says outlandish things on a regular
>basis, such as labeling a Nobel Prize committee as "Swedish
>environmental extremists" and the Environmental Protection Agency as
>"the Gestapo." Tom, you see, does not believe in global warming,
>even as a side effect of his own rhetoric.
>
>Last January, opponents of labor regulations in the Pacific treated
>DeLay to an expense-paid junket to the Mariana Islands, where the
>indigenous garment industry was accused of keeping workers in
>slave-camp conditions. DeLay returned and promptly declared that
>industry to be a "free-market success."...."