What is even creepier, is one of my co-workers is retired from a prior career in which his job was to compromise foreign diplomats. What he claims is that he knew many of the people in DC personally, and that if someone were to pick any one of them (or all of them for that matter) and place them in the USSR, they would have been members of the Supreme Soviet. He truly believes there is no real difference between any of the politicians anywhere in the world (except that the honest ones cannot get anything done).