Boehner and Lungren... Sittin' In A Tree

With a crew of corrupt extremists like Gary Miller, Ken Calvert, Jerry Lewis, Dana Rohrabacher, Brian Bilbray, Wall Herger, Tom McClintock, David Dreier, Buck McKeon, Elton Gallegly, Dan Lungren, Darrell Issa and John Campbell, how the hell do you figure out who the worst congressman from California is? We've spent time investigating each one of these loons and there isn't a decent human being between them. Dan Lungren, however does stand out as particularly foul even in this bunch. After his original congressional district in Long Beach proven to be inhospitable to Lungren's brand of reactionary politics mixed with standard racism and bigotry, a brief stink in Sacramento attracted him to the smell of pork in that area and the former Gingrich lackey carpetbagged his way into the House district that represents most of the Sacramento suburbs.

Lungren is a doctrinaire right-winger-- so far right that he only managed to get around 38% of the California vote when he ran against Gray Davis for governor. And so far right-wing that in 2008 he challenged John Boehner for the Minority Leader position. At the time he wrote a letter to every Republican in Congress whining that the GOP is headed in the wrong direction and would continue to face electoral defeats unless major changes are made. “If we don’t admit our difficulties and address them aggressively, we not only run the risk of becoming a permanent congressional minority but we will do a disservice to our nation,” Lungren wrote. “If we choose by inaction to ignore the real challenges we face, then paraphrasing President Reagan, we deserve to be regulated to the trash heap of history.”

This year Lungren is facing being dumped on the trash heap of history once more-- this time by ascendant Democratic challenger Ami Bera. And who's trying to bail him out? Well, John Boehner, of course, who needs every Republican vote he can muster in his desperate bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. Besides, when most Republicans were fleeing in terror from Bush's no-strings-attached Wall Street bailout, who did Boehner find to help him bring the TARP bill back from the dead? Yes, corrupt Wall Street darling Dan Lungren.

I hope Boehner gets back to Ohio to see the new billboard down the road from his gated golfing community McMansion

Boehner, who seems to have forgotten he's supposed to be representing a hard-pressed district in southwest Ohio still reeling from his championship of Big Business' trade policies-- like NAFTA and CAFTA and all kinds of concessions to China that he helped usher through Congress-- is scurrying around the country raising money for crooks like Lungren. Next Thursday, September 9, the two of them will be hobnobbing with the rich local Republicans at the Carmichael home of crooked real estate developer, Angelo Tsakopoulos, who was fined by the EPA for violating the Clean Water Act, took the case all the way to the Supreme Court before being forced to pay up. Tsakopoulos and his family and their shady companies have dumped millions of dollars into campaign coffers on both sides of the aisle. He doesn't seem to care as much about ideology as about corruptibility and that would explain a particular affinity with the likes of John Doolittle, Rudi Giuliani, the DCCC, Richard Pombo, Jerry Lewis, and, of course, Dan Lungren.

For the super-rich there's an exclusive reception at 6pm where you can get your picture taken with the Orange golfer for $1,000. The hoy polloy are admitted at 7pm ($250 a pair). You're supposed to rsvp to Lindsey Seitchik-- (916) 476-5240 (Lindsey@SeitchikHQ.com). Or you can just show up and say you're with John Boehner or Howie Klein, Boehner's Special Assistant. The address is 7380 Nob Hill Drive, Carmichael, CA 95608.