Republican congressional candidate John Cunningham urged U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, who he is challenging this year, and the rest of the House on Friday to vote against the revised financail bailout proposal.

[img_assist|nid=734|title=John Cunningham (R-Revere)|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=136|height=180]Cunningham, of Revere, said he opposes the legislation and criticized Washington lawmakers for inaccurately characterizing the current financial situation as more dire than it actually is.

"Most everyone in Washington seems to agree that something must be done about this financial crisis, but any time Washington is in agreement, citizens beware," Cunningham said. "It's like the inflated story of Weapons of Mass Destruction used to facilitate our entry into Iraq. Many congressmen went a long with the hysteria and now regret it. Those same people who misled us only a few short years ago are now feeding us another inflated story, and it is amazing to see so many congressmen falling for this type of scare tactic once again."

Cunningham said "the true evidence of indicates that the supposed credit crunch is greatly exaggerated or even nonexistent." To support that claim, Cunningham pointed to a commentary by Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a D.C. Libertarian think tank, that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

"Everyone seems to blame the free market and the greedy people on Wall Street, when the real blame ultimately lies with the federal government, which created these problems through easy credit, market intervention, and regulation, and now wants to solve them with more of the same," Cunningham said.