Shakedown

by digby

Wow. If anyone has ever wondered exactly how the K Street scams work, Brent Wilkes, Duke Cunningham’s pal (along with a bunch of other greedy Republican bastards) spills his guts to the NY Times:

Offering a rare insider’s view, Mr. Wilkes described the appropriations process as little more than a shakedown. He said that lobbyists close to the committee members unceasingly demanded campaign contributions from entrepreneurs like him. Mr. Wilkes and his associates have given more than $706,000 to federal campaigns since 1997, according to public records, and he said he had brought in more as a fund-raiser. Since 2000, Mr. Wilkes’s principal company has received about $100 million in federal contracts.

Mr. Wilkes described the system bluntly: “Lowery would always say, ‘It is a two-part deal,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘Jerry will make the request. Jerry will carry the vote. Jerry will have plenty of time for this. If you don’t want to make the contributions, chair the fund-raising event, you will get left behind.’ ”

And yet the country has yet to be convinced that the Republicans are far more likely to steal their tax money and use it to enrich themselves than Democrats. The facts are the facts, but years of “tax and spend liberal” cant has been so internalized that even when the graft and corruption is right in plain sight, people won’t belive it.

Of course, one of the unspoken truths about “tax and spend” is what they leave unsaid — tax and spend on the wrong kind of people. There are an awful lot of Americans who are not nearly as offended by a bunch of fat cats stealing hundreds of millions in defense contracts as they are at the idea of those “something for nothing” folks in New Orleans signing up for a free FEMA trailer. That’s the American lizard brain the Republicans know and exploit so well.

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