Buck McKeon, Alan GraysonGrayson (D-FL), a relatively junior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has led the battle to keep the U.S. out of another pointless war in the Middle East. Although the Establishment is furious at him-- and looking for pay-back-- Orlando, and Americans everywhere, should be very proud of what he has accomplished on our behalf. Buck McKeon (R-CA) is the polar opposite.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman and founder/chairman of the congressional Drone Caucus Buck McKeon is always boosting wars on behalf of the arms manufacturers who are fianncing his career and his family's wealth. (They have a lobbying firm working with war industries.) His hatred and disrespect for President Obama, on the other hand, sometimes gets him in a muddle.
Just over a year ago, we reported how House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon had a serious conflict of interest stemming form the 6-figure gambling debts he had racked up in Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas casino. This is especially dangerous in light of Adelson's status as a billionaire being completely in the hands of the Chinese government.
Simi Valley makes up almost a third of Buck McKeon's congressional district (CA-25) but it was added to the district in the last cycle and McKeon-- the former mayor of Santa Clarita who has long since become a creature of Washington-- virtually never bothers going there. Preparing for a possible reelection challenge-- he's told the media he's running again and confided to local Republican politicians he's going to retire-- he ventured in Republican-friendly Simi Valley this week.
Not all that many of his own constituents have noticed, but last week the BBC called out a congressman from Santa Clarita: A lawmaker helped create the drone industry-- and has reaped the benefits. Don't expect any exposés like this in the Signal, or even the L.A. Times, but Buck McKeon's cushy-- and extremely corrupt-- deal with the drone industry has been raising eyebrows all over the world.
David Kravets put the vote on the Amash-Conyers amendment to end warrantless domestic spying into a sensible perspective for Wired Last week: Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash. And, appropriately enough, the photo in his piece-- Congress' most corrupt Military Industrial Complex shill, Buck McKeon (R-CA).
Do you ever go to congressional town halls? I actually do. 3 summers ago I reported on one I went to in Alhambra, which turned into one of the first of the crazy Tea Party anti-healthcare set-ups. It was Adam Schiff's town hall and the local crackpot right was determined to disrupt it.
Thursday we saw how Buck McKeon, the Military Industrial Complex's single most bribed politician in American history, forced the Pentagon to waste $2.5 billion on overpriced drones the U.S. military neither needs nor wants.
Political scuttlebutt in Santa Clarita is that Buck McKeon is busy sucking up all the benefits of political corruption available and setting himself up as an armaments lobbyist this session and that he won't run against Lee Rogers again in 2014. Rogers came closer to beating him last year than anyone else in McKeon's whole career. And that was without any help from the DCCC.
You're not going to find anyone in Congress more corrupt than Buck McKeon. True, there are quite a few as corrupt-- on both sides of the aisle-- but no one is more corrupt. He's way up there in the top ranks of major league criminals like John Boehner (R-OH), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Joe Crowley (D-NY), Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, Fred Upton (R-MI)...
