Randy Cunningham, The Worst and Dumbest, part II

Well it must be beat up on Randy Cunningham day. After finishing the post below I found that Tom Oliphant was talking about The king of congressional corruption. He seems to agree with Mr Douglas that Cunningham is not the sharpest knife in the kitchen and points out some of Cunningham's moments of hypocrisy.

Those of us who have derived comic relief from Cunningham's career know that this guy would screw up a two-car motorcade. Frustration looms, however, because the House leadership's ''ethics" machinery has been so completely and intentionally crippled that we will have to depend on the obligation in Cunningham's plea agreement to sing like a canary, and that means depending on Cunningham -- always a lousy bet.

Oliphant confirms the observation by Jack D. Douglas below that Cunningham was a buffoonish front man for all that's wrong with America.

Cunningham was one of the conservative movement's favorite wind-up toys, guaranteed to hold forth whenever it seemed useful to question another public official's patriotism, to disparage minorities be they racial or gay, or to claim the tough guy, masculine upper hand even by challenging colleagues to the fistfights he always seemed to walk away from.

His Republican colleagues rewarded the northern San Diego County congressman with the seat on the Appropriations Committee he used as the platform for his graft. He was, after all, a fighter pilot Vietnam vet, a highly decorated ace at that, and got away for years with making his war record seem synonymous with expertise on military matters and using it as an excuse for his bizarre behavior.

On a trip back to Vietnam a few years ago, he called his hosts ''gooks," he tried to make fun of Representative Barney Frank, and, in a famous moment in the mid-1990s, ran away from a physical challenge by Democratic Representative Jim Moran of Virginia, who chased him off the House floor and into the cloakroom, where Moran found him weeping.

Oliphant goes on to point out that Cunningham was taking large sums of money to fix defense department contracts while questioning John Kerry's patriotism.