"Unprecedented?" "Extraordinary?" Would that it were so...

So a congressman takes a bribe...who'd'a thunk it?

As has been covered extensively the last couple of days, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a decorated pilot from the Vietnam war and a Republian congressman from California, has plead guilty to taking bribes from a defense contractor. This is obviously a bad thing, and it's a good thing that he's been caught, and that he'll be punished.

And I know that the prosecutor has a responsibility to support her case, and probably a feeling of great job satisfaction over the guilty pleas. But some of the rhetoric was, perhaps, a bit...overheated:

U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, whose office is prosecuting the case, said in a news conference that the facts Cunningham admitted in his plea agreement show "this was a crime of unprecedented magnitude and extraordinary audacity."

Pardon my cynicism, but a congressman taking a couple of million dollars worth of bribes from someone business or industry looking for favorable treatment doesn't strike me as unprecedented or extraordinary...