A Tom DeLay Makeover
By GAIL COLLINS
NYT
Let’s talk about midcareer life changes. Or, what the heck, late-career life changes. We’re Americans. We don’t acknowledge deadlines.
Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, was ridiculed for doing the cha-cha on “Dancing With the Stars.” But you have to admit, DeLay’s decision to make a spectacle of himself on national television was a terrific game-changer.
His performance did create the kind of uncomfortable feeling you experienced when your crusty Uncle Fred got drunk at your graduation party and tried to sing “My Way.” But I bet not a single person watching DeLay slide across the floor on his rhinestone-encrusted knees with that manic grin on his face was thinking: “Gee, I wonder how that money-laundering indictment is working out for him?”
And look at Sarah Palin. Everybody thought that she was a desperately uninformed goofball whom the Republican Party might, nevertheless, someday nominate for president in an effort to cement its reputation as worst major American political organization since the Know-Nothings. Then this week she went off to Hong Kong and gave an 80-minute, closed-door speech to financial fund managers, for which she was paid an undisclosed but indisputably vast sum of money. The early reviews from people exiting the ballroom ranged from “well prepared” to “boring.”
(More here.)
NYT
Let’s talk about midcareer life changes. Or, what the heck, late-career life changes. We’re Americans. We don’t acknowledge deadlines.
Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, was ridiculed for doing the cha-cha on “Dancing With the Stars.” But you have to admit, DeLay’s decision to make a spectacle of himself on national television was a terrific game-changer.
His performance did create the kind of uncomfortable feeling you experienced when your crusty Uncle Fred got drunk at your graduation party and tried to sing “My Way.” But I bet not a single person watching DeLay slide across the floor on his rhinestone-encrusted knees with that manic grin on his face was thinking: “Gee, I wonder how that money-laundering indictment is working out for him?”
And look at Sarah Palin. Everybody thought that she was a desperately uninformed goofball whom the Republican Party might, nevertheless, someday nominate for president in an effort to cement its reputation as worst major American political organization since the Know-Nothings. Then this week she went off to Hong Kong and gave an 80-minute, closed-door speech to financial fund managers, for which she was paid an undisclosed but indisputably vast sum of money. The early reviews from people exiting the ballroom ranged from “well prepared” to “boring.”
(More here.)
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