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.

We all know the type – the candidate who can’t lose, the one whose early endorsements and cash grabbing have made their scampaigns irresistible. They simply can’t lose.

More often than not their candidacies are little more than empty sloganeering.   That’s because these folks don’t want to actually offend anybody by talking about a real issue or problem. Rather, they go on about their devotion to party dogma – that very party that has decided that their boy (or girl) has the stamp of official imprimatur.

Here’s one of the species:

And here’s another:

What do you mean there’s a place called Fullerton?

We are supposed to accept these empty suits because of their very inevitability – not because they stand for anything other than their own self-advancement.

Sukhee Kang moved into our State Senate district barely seven months ago to represent us in Sacramento. Before that he left a trail of disasters behind him as Larry Agran’s bobblehead pigeon on the Irvine City Council, whose majority squandered and stole hundreds of millions on an alleged “Great Park.”

But the Democrat Party establishment has ordained that the disgraced Sukhee, despite his carpetbagging, and despite his utter leadership failure in Irvine, must be the party standard bearer.  Apart from the cynical scheme to harvest Asian votes ( a dubious enterprise at best, anyhow), the only other rationale is that Sukhee is the Man.

“I” is for idiotic. It also stands for “Irvine.” And, not-coincidentally, “iShuttle.”

What, you ask, is iShuttle? It’s a monstrously expensive bus service cooked up by Irvine’s Agran-Kang-Krom crew to move people around Irvine and to get them to the airport, too.

“What a good idea” you might think at first. But then after you  reviewed  the hard, cold facts you would have to think again.

It may have been expensive and empty but it sure was clean…

As admitted by then Irvine Mayor Sukhee Kang himself, in 2011, the iShuttle shuttled 88,000 fares  the previous year, or only a measly 350 riders per work day. And yet this service cost the taxpayers of Orange County – via the OCTA – $1,400,000 per year. And that folks, amounts to an astonshing cost of $16 per ride, virtually 100% subsidized by the taxpayers. And boy was the sky the limit – up to a staggering $121,000,000 for empty buses! Might as well have bought those people taxi rides.

Dazed and confused…waiting for Larry’s script…

The OC Register also covered the shifty deal that created this squandering of the public’s money, and its trust.

It’ll get you there – eventually

Unfortunately, this is precisely the same sort of cavalier indifference to economy and common sense that marked Sukhee Kang’s tenure on the Irvine City Council, a tenure characterized by his unfathomable waste of $250,000,000 on the “Great Park” swindle.

Balloon goes up, balloon goes down. Hey, wait a minute, where’s my Great Park?

Smart enough to see the handwriting on the wall, Sukhee swiftly swerved out of Irvine and has recently alighted in Fullerton. Sukhee wants to represent north Orange County in Sacramento as our State Senator. Sukhee says his top priorities are jobs, transportation and education.

No-bid jobs for crony consultants? Transportation that is wasteful and useless? Well at least we will be getting an education – all about Sukhee’s notions of competency and efficiency.

Science fiction is fun entertainment, but who knew there might be instructive political parallels?

One of the recurring themes of sci-fi is the alien invasion, wherein some weird alien decides to set up shop in the human realm.

Kang!

Here’s one. This dude and his crew invaded the Starship Enterprise. His name? You guessed it: Kang the Klingon!

Kang!!

Oops! Yet another alien Kang, courtesy of the Simpsons. Will Kang and his alien pal Kodos ever succeed in subjugating humanity?

Kang!!!

And finally, yet another Kang: Sukhee variety, actually dangerous because his invasion is real: he is a would-be career politician making a run for it out of his Irvine homeland where he left a trail of disasters, only to latch upon our little part of the world, a chunk of geography this political interloper knows nothing about.

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.

No park, just hot air…

People need to know about what happened at the so-called Great Park.

Why? Because one of the architects of that quarter billion dollar boondoggle moved into Fullerton so he could run for higher office in a place where his misdeeds could be papered over, or, better yet, successfully ignored.

Things were just so confusing…

And that individual would be Sukhee Kang, former Puppet-mayor of Irvine for the Larry Agran Machine.

Larry Agran, political boss of Irvine

For a good sense of the enormity of the rip-off, the no-bid, fixed fee contracts to the Agran Machine’s political operatives, and the arrogance demonstrated by Boss Agran himself, check out this story by OC Weekly’s inimitable R. Scott Moxley. Here is Agran, last February, ignoring a subpoena from Anthony Taylor, the lawyer the City hired to investigate the Great Park fiasco. Be sure to follow the links backward to get a fuller appreciation of the Agran cesspool.

When Agran finally did consent to be deposed a few weeks later, as Moxley relates, the stonewalling that has marked the investigations into the Great Park’s corruption continued. It was so bad the City of Irvine pursued contempt charges against Agran for refusing to answer questions.

In that  last story Moxley distills the whole Great Pork mess: Taylor’s investigation produced convincing evidence that Agran and his allies, including councilwoman Beth Krom and ex-councilman Sukhee Kang, mismanaged the project by wasting tens of millions of dollars in highly questionable expenditures.

There you have it: irresponsible, arrogant, unaccountable grifters – as addicted to consuming public money as a low-grade rapper is his sizzurp.

Well, this is OC where politicians can pretty much do whatever they want with legal impunity. What they can’t get away with, is having their malfeasance ignored.

People who no doubt have something to gain by saying such things are describing carpetbagging 29th State Senate District candidate Sukhee Kang of Irvine as “hard-working” and a “great fundraiser.”

I may be knocking on your door this Halloween.

I don’t know if those statements are even true, but they are hardly better than saying somebody takes up space and can move around – given the abysmal trail of disasters Sukhee left behind him. When an individual’s political campaign is already in the morgue, you have the spooky and rather disturbing spectacle of the zombie candidate.

Okay, so I want to bite your face off… but look at all my endorsements!

The idea that Sukhee can buy himself an election though massive fundraising efforts is so ridiculous that it hardly needs to be seriously addressed. I mean, how much money would it take to divert attention away from the millions of dollars he handed out in Irvine in no-bid, fixed fee contracts to political pals? And what about the titanic failure of the Great Park where $250,000,000 was spent, somehow, with ZERO to show for it. What about the $16 per ride iShuttle, to ferry well-to-do Irviners around at our expense? I don’t think there is that much money.

Sukhee’s past is scary!

Is that the aroma of decaying flesh clinging to the skeletal frame of Sukhee’s candidacy? There you have it: Zombie Candidate. It’s in the morgue, and that’s where we intend to keep it.