You were the only democratic politician I ever thought was worth a damn. I remember when I was a kid and I would see your limo going down miley road occasionally. You waved at me every time. You were a wierd son of a bitch and corrupt as all hell, but what else could one expect from youngstown? Rest in peace, jimmy. May angels replace your hairpiece with one that fits.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/james-traficant-1941-2014_806245.html(excerpt)
If I sported a hairpiece, I’d be wearing it at half-mast right about now, upon hearing that the world just grew a little less interesting. For the most colorful man who ever inhabited Congress, former Ohio Democratic Rep. James A . Traficant Jr., expired today at the age of 73. Traficant—he of the Barney Miller-era suits and conspiracy theories and “beam-me-up” one-minute floor speeches and the toupee that looked like a marmot getting electroconvulsive therapy—died as he lived: crushed beneath the weight of The Machine. A tractor he was driving rolled over on him.
I, for one, will miss him, much as I did when he went to federal prison in 2002 to serve a seven-year sentence on corruption charges. Well before Traficant became a federal inmate, I went to see him for a profile. Though we were only in each other’s company for one day, he gave me everything a profiler could want: sex (he informed me in a crowded Rayburn Building elevator that a lot of women hit on him and he takes them on out of a “responsibility to the American woman”), violence (he slapped me in the face while insisting on calling me “Kibosh” instead of “Labash,” accusing me of coming to do “a castration job”) and intimacies (he spent hours insisting that Janet Reno, whose Justice Department was then bearing down on him, was a lesbian mob puppet).
We got along so famously, that I promised/threatened to call him again. Traficant emphatically told me not to: “You ain’t gonna catch up with me no more. Don’t call me again.” But then, as a token of affection, he offered me an American flag, once flown over the Capitol. I still kept an eye on Traficant in the years that followed—as he shipped off to prison, as he started painting horses on prison cardboard and Formica and selling them on his website (beammeupart.com), as he unsuccessfully ran for Congress again upon his release, getting stomped by an old political aide, even though the creaky Rust-Belt Dem whose career presaged the Tea Party Revolution had vowed to lead the charge to abolish the IRS and repeal the 16th Amendment.
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