It will be interesting to see whether the broadcast and print media publish information about former Tom Scanlon, Jack Abramoff's former business partner and Tom DeLay's former aide, that was revealed in Senate Indian Affairs hearings. The hearings are investigating the pair's apparent conning of Indian tribes for millions of dollars. It appears that a memorandum related to their lucrative casino ventures also reveals a great deal about their lack of respect for the people they were manipulating by raising "values" issues. The following is from a report on Salon.com here.
Consider one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.
"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."
If the media would cover this kind of information, maybe it would make it harder for con artists to abuse people's confidence so easily.