The D.C. Government's All-Star Embarrassments

David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of HBO's The Wire and Treme, made a surprise call into a Washington, D.C. radio program on Thursday. WAMU's The Kojo Nnamdi Show is required listening for anyone who pays attention to local District of Columbia politics, and Simon, it turns out, was listening in the car while driving his daughter to her grandmother’s house. The topic of Thursday's Kojo was the latest in a string of embarrassing federal corruption cases brought against elected D.C. officials over the last year, in this case, the resignation of D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown in the wake of felony bank fraud charges related to falsified home mortgage documents.

Nnamdi and his guests spent most of the program going through the finer points of the charges against Brown (the former Chairman was subsequently also charged with a misdemeanor violation of the District's campaign finance laws) and attempting to parse what his resignation means for the city's political future. But Simon called in to wag a finger at the prosecutors involved in the case, claiming the specific charges brought against Brown were weak sauce.