Redstate

Posted at 11:30am on Jan. 14, 2008 "The Pork King Keeps His Crown"

Voters won't mess with the man who brings home the Bacon.

By Jeff Emanuel

Credit where credit is due: the New York Times came up with that article title, and I just had to "appropriate" it for use here.

Anyway, Abscam Jack Murtha made another seriously good haul for his district in 2007, bringing home $162 million in pork and favors, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group. Such huge district favors are nothing new for the would-be House leader, who has spent years buying his permanent place in Congress by bringing home bacon by the tonne.

Besides Abscam and Pork, Murtha is best known, of course, for being the most outspoken (and uninformed) critic on Capitol Hill of the Iraq War, the Bush defense policy, and of the military as a whole. However, he had an eleventh-hour change of tune on Iraq this winter, when he went back on months of attacks and rampages and actually cited "progress" on his return from a Thanksgiving-week trip to Iraq -- a move which fit into the shifting narrative on that country (as seen by Congressmen suddenly admitting progress there, and by the media dropping Iraq as a topic altogether) far too well (and countered his previous, venemously-defended positions far too strongly) to be sincere.

Read on.

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