Polls routinely show that most Americans give very low approval ratings to Congress as a whole, but give much higher ratings to their own representatives. Count me among the minority that would give an even lower rating to their own representative than Congress as a whole. That's because my representative is the egregious Jim Moran.

Recent data reveal that Moran is one of the biggest porkers in Congress, and second only to Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha in reaping campaign contributions from the beneficiaries of his earmarks. Of course, that's exactly what you would expect from the man who said back in 2006 that "[w]hen I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I'm going to earmark the shit out of it." He has certainly kept his campaign promise.

Massive earmarking hardly exhausts the list of Moran's shortcomings. He has also flirted with anti-Semitism, notoriously blaming the Iraq War on "the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, [without which] we would not be doing this." This despite the fact that Jewish opinion has consistently been more hostile to the war than general public opinion. Such statements don't definitively prove that Moran is an anti-Semite. But they do suggest that he is either anti-Semitic or grossly ignorant about the true distribution of Jewish opinion (despite the fact that his district has Virginia's largest concentration of Jewish voters), or both. None of these three possibilities speak well of Moran, to put it mildly.

Finally, Moran is likely guilty of corruption (see, e.g., here).

There are probably some congressmen who are worse than mine. But even in a body not known for its high moral standards, there can't be too many.