Dana Rohrabacher likes to get worked up nowadays and shout the word, “patriot.”
And the man who skipped all Vietnam War military service but became an angry hawk after he'd passed the draft age isn't shy about hailing himself as one of our nation's leading patriots.
Just ask the Costa Mesa Republican congressman.
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Somehow, he also considers himself an expert in American History.
At a November 9 ground breaking ceremony in Tehachapi for a 68,000-square-foot space craft manufacturing plant for The Spaceship Company (TSC), Rohrabacher once again demonstrated his knack for twisting well-established history to fit his present day political rants.
“This is the Plymouth Rock of the new modern American space lines,” the congressman said, according to an account in
Tehachapinews.com.
But then he added this: “They [I presume he was referring to the Pilgrims but who knows?] conquered the frontier and got here to California. If they had relied on the federal government we'd still be on the East Coast.”
Huh?
Certainly, Rohrabacher should know what every fifth grader knows: it was the federal government that took California from Mexico by force; that massive federal tax subsidies and grants helped fund the westward expansion of the nation's railroad system; and government revenue completely funded the interstate highway system.
The additional irony here is that the man who loves to spew anti-government rhetoric is also advocating massive government subsidies to companies hoping to make private profits from space ventures.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
