REPUBLICAN CULTURE OF CORRUPTION-- TAKE 227

A couple nights ago Roland came over for dinner and acknowledged that the little Cunningham scandal I started obsessing over last May actually turned into something. "But enough with this already," he said. "It's in the TIMES; he took bribes; they all do. Time to move on." He's a reformed cow-tipper from Maine (and I don't mean Portland) and he is wrong, wrong, wrong. The Cunningham scandal, even apart from it being emblematic of a systematic and strikingly unique Republican Culture of Corruption, is anything but over. It has barely begun. The alluded to bribers in Cunningham's judicial documents were bribing many more Republican congressmen and congresswomen than just the fat, arrogant and stupid Cunningham. But what makes this story startling is that at least one or two of these bribers seems to have been primarily in "business" to kick back and funnel taxpayer dollars into the Republican political machine!

Brent Wilkes owned and operated a number of firms that benefited mightily from Republican generosity. His companies were raking in millions of dollars. But they were by and large paper companies that didn't do anything. Oh, stike that; they did do something: they funded a large number of Republican campaigns (and stuffed illegal cash up the asses of "Duke" Cunningham, Jerry Lewis, Tom DeLay and God only knows how many more like these foxes in charge of the People's hen house).

I first stumbled on Cunningham when I was looking into another grossly crooked far right California congressman, Jerry Lewis from the High Desert/Big Bear area. I noticed that Lewis and Cunningham were getting inordinantly large contributions from the same donors and that they were all donors who were doing business with Lewis' Defense Appropriations Committee. Something stunk. And now the mainstream media is finally starting to sniff around the edges of the story.

Not unlike the Thomas Noe-web of illicit transactions that oversaw the looting of Ohio's Workmen's Compensation Board in favor of the Ohio Republican Party and the Ohio BushCheney campaign's efforts to steal the presidential election in 2004, ADCS was shovelling millions of dollars into Republican campaign coffers far beyond Cunningham. Millions that Congress allocated for defense and intelligence projects-- money that, for example, could have been used to buy the armor that so many American fighting men complained about not having on the front lines in Iraq-- was diverted into the hands of Republican hacks like Californians John Doolittle (who was also one of the Abramoff scumbags), Duncan Hunter, Bill Van de Weghe, Jr. and Darrell Issa, as well as Jerry Weller(R-IL), George Gekas (R-PA), Katherine Harris (R-FL), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Henry Bonilla (R-TX), Steve Pearce (R-NM), Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), Elizabeth Dole (R-NC), and of course 2 of the most corrupt men in the history of American politics, one coasting under the radar and the other awaiting trial in Texas as money laundering charges: George W. Bush and Tom DeLay.

No, this isn't a story that is going away. This is a story that should shake the foundations of an institutionally corrupt American political system where cash is king and powerful, avaricious politicians are stealing taxpayer dollars by the millions while destroying the lives of countless citizens. I would think that once the Democrats retake Congress in 2006 this-- along with electronic vote rigging-- would be the first items on their plate.


8AM UPDATE: MUCH FROG-WALKING TO COME

Now even Fox "News," a right-wing propaganda outlet closely associated with the Bush Regime and the Republican Party, is reporting a wide-ranging corruption scandal encompassing not just Cunningham but dozens of Republican elected officials including George Bush, Tom DeLay, Jerry Lewis, Duncan Hunter, John Doolittle, Pete Hoekstra, Virgil Goode, Katherine Harris, Larry Craig and Arnold Schwarzenegger.