The $63,000,000 Boondoggle

Duncan Hunter, the man who wants to be put in charge of the Federal Treasury, has seen the all-too-slow-death of the $63 million plane that doesn't fly, one which he enthusiastically supported for two decades.

Millions of dollars later, Congress has effectively killed a military plane program the Pentagon repeatedly rejected, and which never had a successful flight.

The $63 million Congress poured into the DP2 program over 20 years was not requested by the Department of Defense. Instead, it was mandated through obscure provisions in bills known as "earmarks." Most of those earmarks for the DP2 were inserted by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., in whose district the plane was designed and built, in prototype.

The 2008 defense spending bill does not include an earmark for the DP2. Hunter had wanted to direct $6 million toward the plane's development.

Designed as a plane that can take off straight up and then fly at 700 miles per hour, the DP2 has never attained a height of more than a few feet in prototype tests before crashing to the ground.

I guess the good news here is that, if on the off-chance that everyone's voting rights were taken away but Ann Coulter's, and he were elected, the whole country would be his district, meaning lots of pork for everyone! And since executive branch officials can apparently get corporate-funded trips without any problems, Hunter will be right at home... in Bizarro America, during the Hunter presidency.