California’s Tom Lantos is an old-school liberal Democrat, more in the mold of JFK or Scoop Jackson than the current crop of America haters. Sadly, he announced today that he will retire from Congress after his current term due to cancer of the esophagus. Here’s what he had to say in a statement released today:
“It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress,” he said. “I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”
Of course, it doesn’t surprise me that this was the last paragraph in the San Francisco Chronicle story. Wouldn’t want to play up any patriotism in the Bay Area, now.