The Passion of Congressman Haw-Haw

Have you ever entertained the question of for what sort of people the Haditha Slanderer would have compassion?

Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat known for delivering federal money to defense contractors in his district, is now going to bat for a constituent’s company that was convicted last year of illegally exporting components of military equipment.

Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, wrote State Department officials in late June urging them to meet with the president of Electro-Glass Products, a fifty-employee company that was convicted in April 2007 of illegally exporting components of night-vision goggles to a company in India. The Mammoth, Pennsylvania, firm has been sanctioned by the State Department, and Murtha argues that the action threatens to put the firm out of business.

“Electro-Glass is a highly respected company known for its honesty,” Murtha wrote. He said the company, which manufactures small glass rings called “preforms,” would not have made the shipments “if they truly believed the shipments were in violation of the law.” He added: “It will be genuinely unfortunate if they are forced to close their doors.”

"Honest"? Here's the rest of the story on EGP:

Well, excuse me, but the first indication that Electro-Glass broke the law is that they didn’t get an export license for their product. That doesn’t sound terribly “honest” to me, although the concept of honesty could be foreign to a porker like Murtha. That failure suggests that Electro-Glass deliberately attempted to evade the oversight of the State Department, and that they only discovered their basic “honesty” when most criminals feel remorse: moments after getting caught.

Nor was this the first time the company found out about the requirement. State “counseled” them in 1994 for doing exactly the same thing. Ten years later, they re-offended, which is why State chose to prosecute them the second time.

So, in other words, what we have here is a pattern of dishonesty and criminality. Electro-Glass is being punished after having not just broken export laws designed to help safeguard U.S. national security by protecting U.S. military technology, not just of being serial offenders, but the second time around not even bothering to conceal their betrayal. And the same State Department from which Haw-Haw is begging mercy on EPG's behalf already gave them a second chance, and we see what they did with it.

Everybody, that is, except the Abscam unindicted co-conspirator, who never has anything good to say about U.S. servicepeople, but whose flinty, black heart bleeds for corrupt mercenary outfits that think nothing of compromising our ability to defend ourselves by giving away all our hard-developed means of doing so.

Anybody want to talk about Congress' "Culture of Corruption" again?