San Diego Politics

While my self-hyped Deliafest Week is turning into a Deliabust (i.e., Wednesday and no sighting yet, although this was posted today), I saw something that was really amusing: Howard Kaloogian's (R-CA) "photo" of Baghdad with this description: "We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism."


(The above photo with explanations is courtesy of the folks at Democratic Underground. The unretouched "Iraq" version was from Kaloogian's original website - the URL since taken down and replaced by something more innocous, which I will not post here as I do not want to give this jerk and his campaign any mileage - but you can see still see a screenshot with the Turkey picture halfway down the page.)

If you are not from the Left Coast, you tend to think of California as a bastion of liberal politics with a sprinkling of anomalies like Ahnuld, RayGun, and Nixon. San Diego, being right on the border, should be as welcoming as Mother Liberty herself, right? Instead it has moved to the right (courtesy of the military bases?) and in the process produced dickheads like Dick Murphy (R-Mayor), the GOP City Council (who used pension fund $$$ to, among other things, bankroll the 1996 GOP Convention), Duncan Hunter (R-57th District), Darrell Issa (R-Viper Car Alarm), and of course, Duke Cunningham. Please don't get me wrong, the Republicans do not have a monopoly on SD corruption: a Democrat mayor (and his councilman bud) served one day in office before being arrested for taking illegal campaign contributions from strip clubs (what, free lap dances weren't enough, they had to take the money too?). The quid pro quo: the clubs wanted to lift an ordinance preventing nude dancers and patrons from touching. (This once and for all proves my theory that Democrats go for the sex and Republicans go for the money.)

I've been to San Diego and it's a wonderful town: nice weather, great Mexican food, big zoo... and according to both NY Times and USA Today is also Enron-by-the-Sea. Maybe now they are replacing corrupt with stupid. Exhibit 1: Howard Kaloogian whose stupid attempt at Bush ass-kissing involved mistaking Turkey for Iraq.

Delia's brothers, Charles and Michael, both live in San Diego, are both into real estate, and both have a degree in political science. How about one of them run for anything, like Duke's seat? Or maybe the San Diego Marathon?


Keywords: Delia Gallagher