holy holy crap

Patrick asked for this year to be the year "the chickens come home to roost and peck the fucking eyes out of the Right."

His wish just got a little bit closer, if this story is true:

Washington's power players have always bragged about being well-wired, but for disgraced former congressman Duke Cunningham, "wired" wasn't just a figure of speech. In a week when legislators are focused on the question of who else might be brought down by ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s cooperation with prosecutors as he seeks lenient sentencing over his two federal guilty pleas this week, sources tell TIME that in a separate investigation, ex-Rep. Cunningham wore a wire to help investigators gather evidence against others just before copping his own plea.

Sources familiar with the situation say Cunningham, a California Republican who pleaded guilty Nov. 28 to taking $2.4 million in bribes—including a yacht, a Rolls Royce and a 19th-century Louis-Philippe commode—from a defense contractor, wore a wire at some point during the short interval between the moment he began cooperating with the feds and the announcement of his guilty plea on Nov. 28.

Holy crap. If this is true, there's the potential for a whole pile of very dirty US politicians to end up in jail. And even if no-one gets prosecuted, the notion that their fellow scumbag congresscritters might be talking to them while wired has got to scare the hell of these arseholes. I have a mental image of congressional caucus meetings starting with a mobster-like checking each other for recording devices. This amuses me.

Mark Twain had it right: “There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress.”