Sukhee Kang Watch

Okay, this is just a little weird in a funny way. And desperate.

We know that politicians are always talking up their military experience, if they have any; and sometime fabricating it if they don’t.

A campaign advisor must have told Mr. Sukhee Kang that he really needed to remind voters in the 29th State Senate District that he is a veteran. It might help – after all Sukhee has only lived in Fullerton a few months, nobody knows who he is,  and everybody loves a vet, right? Sukee’s website devotes an entire section to dwell upon Sukhee’s military service.

The odd thing about this pitch is that Sukhee didn’t serve in our army; he was a non-com soldier in the 70s during the South Korean regime of Park Chung-hee, a quasi-dictator (later assassinated) whose government demanded compulsory military conscription. Now, to be fair, Sukhee isn’t hiding the fact that he didn’t serve in our military, but he’s trying real hard to make his experience relevant.

Somehow, some cynical campaign consultant believes this poofed-up narrative of an utterly unremarkable record can be used to prove Sukhee’s patriotism, devotion to duty, and even more tenuously, his affinity with American servicemen.

I am reminded of how in Irvine, Sukhee’s former running buddies – Agran and Krom pretended to be all gung-ho about a military cemetery at the Great Park, when in reality they just wanted to stall and embarrass the new council majority that got stuck with their 10 years of Great Park corruption and mismanagement. Of course their sympathies seem to be  more with exploitable dead veterans than with living ones.

If you looked closely you might almost see him…

Here is last February’s deposition of former Irvine mayor, Mr. Sukhee Kang by Anthony Taylor, the lawyer the City of Irvine hired to try to sort out the Great Park mess engineered by Kang, Beth Krom, and their puppeteer, Larry Agran.

The deposition is telling, not because Sukhee can remember much of anything (he can’t), but because the picture it paints of a small-time politician – ambitious and attention-seeking, but totally at the mercy of the bureaucrats who are supposed to put his policy into action.

Over and over again we read the hapless Sukhee explaining how he did, or would have, run off to Irvine’s City Manager to find out what to do in any given circumstance.

At one point Sukhee admits that as mayor they just piled stuff on his desk and he signed it. He also admits that as mayor he executed the Great Park Schematic Design Phase Settlement document that had never been voted on by anybody.

As to the overall Great Park fiasco, he reads like the affable idiot Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes who made the line “I know nothing!” famous.

Of the eight years the Great Park promises slowly withered into nothingness, Sukhee has only fond memories – when he remembers anything at all – especially his confidence in his wonderful staff and his consultants – one of whom was laying out big bucks to attend some Korean fundraising event at Sukhee’s behest.  Nice.

Some have wondered if Sukhee really is some sort of smart, engaged and hands-on guy, or whether he was just a useful stooge and front man for Larry Agran, the real driving force behind the Great Park disaster. Although it hardly matters, the answer is obviously the latter.

By the way, two of really funny (if unintentionally so) lines in the deposition appear on page 70 in which Sukhee asserts “I am a perfectionist;” and, on page 96 where he describes himself thus: “I am very fiscally prudent.”

Well you’d never know it by the comedy of errors and malfeasance that marked Sukhee’s role in the Great Park debacle.