Tom DeLay, Shaved Beaver: Together at Last
Weknewwe should've renewed our membership at the Safari Club. They had a celebrity auctioneer Tuesday night, you see, by the name of Tom DeLay. One of the items he auctioned off was "a sheared beaver fur vest," and before you start sniggering at that, well, the former Majority Leader waswayahead of you.
Heard on the Hill quotes DeLay-as-auctioneer: "Who wants a beaver?" "Everybody likes beaver, even women" and ("as a couple of people in the crowd recall"), "The best thing about it, it's a shaved beaver!"
At one point, as the bidding went up, DeLay pointed in the crowd to Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) as he held up the fur vest and said, "Sen. Burr, they don't have beaver like this down in North Carolina."
Burr, according to his spokeswoman, got to the event late and "was not aware" that DeLay had impugned the beaver of North Carolina.
The beaver went for $1400. To a lobbyist, natch. DeLay's daughter Danni DeLay Ferro, acting as spokeswoman, points out that, had the item been different, her father "could have made a joke about a shaved zebra, but that's not what the item was ... it was what it was." As Gertrude Stein said, a shaved beaver is a shaved beaver is a shaved beaver.
Leave it to Beaver [Roll Call]