Cunningham’s resignation

Representative Cunningham Resigns.

So. First of all, I had to do a bit of digging to learn that Cunningham is a Republican. For *some* reason, the “liberal media” did not make mention of this in the reports I’ve heard on this subject. Granted, those reports are few and far between, but the party mention was missing, and there was language in the radio report that made it sound like he was a Dem.

And since my liberal blogosphere friends haven’t seen any reason to mention this case, I wondered if, perhaps, this latest example of corruption might be a Democrat. I mean, it’s happened in the past. Democrats are human, too.

But no, because if that were the case, then my Republican friends in the blogosphere would be hopping all over him.

Anyway, during the time when I suspected that Cunningham might be a Democrat, I thought to myself “Gosh, should *I* mention this? Will bringing attention to this corruption serve anyone?” And at that time, I started mentally composting a blog post that went something like this:

You know, I’m not exactly proud of this latest scandal– certainly, it can only hurt the Democrats to have one of their own brought down for corruption. And I’ll say it right now, that Cunningham deserves to go to jail for this. He deserves it. He took money in exchange for preferential treatment. He took bribes and then lied to everyone for months about it, steadfastly maintaining that he hadn’t done anything he was accused of.

But I know what the line will be from the Democrats: At least nobody died. It’s a really sad state of affairs when the bar is so low, you can be excused for bad behavior just because your lies didn’t result in two thousand servicemen and women dying. Actually, it’s a really sad state of affairs if we think we can excuse this kind of thing at all. Ever. Even when it’s in our own party.

Anyway, now that I’ve learned that Cunningham is, in fact, a Republican, I can’t really say that I’m surprised. Taking defense contract bribes? Yeah, that sounds like SOP in the GOP these days.

Seriously, though, I keep waiting for all those middle-of-the-road Republicans to come rescue the rest of us from this farce of America, but I’m not sure there are as many of them as people keep claiming. I mean, I have two of you on my friends list– where are the rest?

Anyway, I guess you can distill the rest of my thoughts down to this: Bad Congressman. No biscuit!

PS: Yes, I know I have an old userpic for this political post. Deal with it. That’s how often I post about partisan politics.

November 2005: Book Reviews

This is an archive of my shorter book reviews and notes, which historically have been posted over at the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal, but which I’m starting to move over here. I’m posting them with altered date-stamps, but they might show up in my LiveJournal cross-post anyway. Bear with me, please.

Note: Many of these books also have full reviews available in the book review podcast (RSS).
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