According to the Los Angeles Times, in 1988 DeLay's father, Charles, was allowed to die after suffering severe injuries in an accident that over a 27-day period left him in a coma with no hope of recovery.

His family told doctors not to connect him to life support systems that would have kept him alive artificially. Charles died soon thereafter.

"Doctors conducted a series of tests, including scans of his head, face, neck and abdomen," the Times reported, adding that the doctors checked for lung damage and performed a tracheostomy to assist his breathing but were unable to prevent steady deterioration.

In the end his organs began to fail. "His family and physicians confronted the dreaded choice so many other Americans have faced: to make heroic efforts or to let the end come," the Times wrote.

"Daddy did not want to be a vegetable," one of his daughters-in-law at the time told the Times. "There was no decision for the family to make. He made it for them."

The Los Angeles Times report is getting wide play from the media and was published on the AP wire.

Is DeLay guilty of hyprocrisy?

That's not the case, and the media is mixing apples with oranges.

The Times cleverly managed to draw a comparison between the DeLay family's decision and DeLay's own actions 16 years later in the Terri Schiavo case.

The paper claimed that "More than 16 years ago, far from the political passions that have defined the Schiavo controversy, the DeLay family endured its own wrenching end-of-life crisis. The man in a coma, kept alive by intravenous lines and oxygen equipment, was DeLay's father, Charles Ray DeLay."

That family tragedy, the Times said, was a private ordeal — "without judges, emergency sessions of Congress or the debate raging outside Terri Schiavo's Florida hospice."

Recalling that DeLay joined with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to push emergency legislation through Congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary, the Times reported that the Texas congressman "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."

Despite the Times' assertion that according to doctors Terri Schiavo "has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, connected to her feeding tube," there is substantial evidence that she has not been in any such state.

Moreover, unlike Charles DeLay, Schiavo was not and has never been in a coma.

Most important, she has never required artificial life support systems such as the oxygen equipment sustaining the life of DeLay's father.

Almost all of the advocates supporting Terri's right to life and basic sustenance agree that artificial life support from machines is not required.

In the Schiavo case, Terri is not kept alive by any machines, such as a respirator. In fact, she breathes on her own, reacts to her surroundings and, according to testimony of nurses who treated her, was able to speak and otherwise communicate. Considering that she is now nine days into forced starvation and still alive, she was in considerably good health.

The facts are clear. In the case of Charles DeLay, nature was allowed to take its course. He was comatose and could not be kept alive without artificial equipment, including a respirator.

Terri Schiavo, to the contrary, has survived for 15 years without being hooked up to any machines and is only being fed, a natural need shared by all human beings.

Charles DeLay expired naturally. Terri Schiavo was condemned to death by a judge who demanded that she be dehydrated and starved.

She is being killed by the denial of basic sustenance - distinctions the Times chose to ignore in its effort to smear Tom DeLay.

Editor's note: