Doolittle: Role Model for Pay to Play Lifestyle

I found this blog post, Abramoff Lite - Brent Wilkes at TPM Cafe a good read. It's a reaction to a piece in today's San Diego Union Tribune about Duke Cunningham's defense contractor sugar daddy, Brent Wilkes. Doolittle, it seems, has received the largest reported amount of money from Wilkes.

Excerpt:

Wilkes had a profound understanding of the procurement process and the roll that members of congress such as Doolittle, Lewis, Hunter and Cunningham could play in insuring that his ventures got public money without the distractions of competitive bidding or even without evidence of demand for their products from the Department of Defense.

[...]

This is the Republican Party at work. Men like Doolittle, Lewis, Hunter, Cunningham and DeLay have no problems cutting programs for the poor, the elderly, veterans, etc.; but when a Republican rainmaker appears and offers them campaign contributions in exchange for slopping some taxpayers dollars his way, they fall all over themselves to make it happen.

Republican apologists will tell us that the campaign system is to blame, not the candidates. To get elected these men needed money and they had to work with men like Brent Wilkes to get it.

Guess what? That's a load of crap. Doolittle, Lewis, Hunter, Cunningham and DeLay went out of their way to find men like Brent Wilkes. Republican businessmen, who are as ethically challenged as are they. Men who understood that a "quid pro quo" arrangement didn't have to be formalized in a contract to take place.

Here's the Daily Muck about the same article on Wilkes. One of Doolittle's lies is uncovered:

Doolittle was an enthusiastic backer of the PerfectWave earmarks. And last week, in a Washington Post piece on earmarks, he said his backing for PerfectWave was “based solely on the project's merits and the written support of the military.” That was a lie:

But the only evidence Doolittle's office could provide to show military support for the project was a letter of praise from Robert Lusardi, a program manager for light armored vehicles at the Marine Corps dated Feb. 25 – two and a half years after PerfectWave got its first earmark. By the time Lusardi wrote his letter, the company had received at least $37 million in earmarks.

So a letter from a Marine after the money was awarded – that’s “the written support of the military.”

Doolittle and his peeps must think we're stupid or something. All he has to do is sponsor idiotic save the flag, save the candy canes and save "In God We Trust" resolutions and we'll forget he's the poster boy for the House lobbying scandals, and, if we do pay attention to the leftist media, we'll forgive him because of all the pork he's delivered.

John Doolittle and his cronies would be wise to recall a famous saying attributed to President Lincoln:

"You can fool some of the people all of the time,
and all of the people some of the time,
but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."