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DeLay squashes citizen calls

From Salon.com, we learn that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is squashing citizens’ attempts to contact him and make their voices heard. (You’ll need a free day pass to view the entire Salon article that is linked above and excerpted below.)

The progressive Internet organizing group MoveOn.org has reduced two pillars of the right-wing establishment to pulling petulant phone pranks. On Tuesday, the office of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, angry that MoveOn members were wasting the staff's time with complaints about DeLay's handling of a House resolution on FCC regulation, started forwarding its phone calls to MoveOn organizer Eli Pariser's cellphone. The day before, Bob McManus, the New York Post's opinion-page editor, published MoveOn's Noah Winer's phone number in the headline of his Monday column and urged readers to "swarm" him.

McManus refers to MoveOn as "cyberbullies" and writes that Winer -- whose name he spells "Weiner" -- "oozes annoying self-righteousness."

MoveOn's phone wars began with two e-mails the group sent to its members. The first was about the conservative columnist Robert Novak...

Winer sent an e-mail to MoveOn members, urging them to call Novak's bosses at the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Post and CNN and demand that the conservative columnist be fired for endangering national security -- and "to remain polite and professional" while doing so.

The second MoveOn message, sent on Tuesday morning, was about DeLay's efforts to block a vote on a resolution that would roll back the Federal Communications Commission vote to loosen media ownership rules. ... DeLay is working with the White House to preserve the FCC's attempt at deregulation. Thus he and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., are refusing to bring the resolution to the House floor. MoveOn e-mailed its members urging them to contact DeLay and Hastert and ask them to allow a vote.

Neither of these efforts are novel. Advocacy groups constantly ask members to contact their government representatives, and organizations on both the right and left frequently mount campaigns to pressure the media to reflect their views.

Pariser is more surprised by DeLay's stunt, not because he expects better from the former Texas bug-killer, but because, as he says, "This is the guy who's the majority leader. He has a responsibility not just to members of Congress, but to the whole country."

DeLay's office doesn't see it that way. As a MoveOn member wrote in an e-mail to Pariser, "I was also able to reach Rep. DeLay's office. There, I was interrupted in the middle of my first sentence, asked if this was about the FCC, and placed on hold. After a few seconds someone else answered and I learned that Rep. DeLay's office had forwarded my call to MoveOn.org. Evidently, they have no interest in the opinions of a citizen." Pariser has since changed the message on his cellphone, urging callers to try DeLay again.