Kendrick Meek: “With that, if I may, what is so disturbing about this whole thing, once again, is the fact that like my colleague from…”

“With that, if I may, what is so disturbing about this whole thing, once again, is the fact that like my colleague from Florida, this whole culture idea, and we talked the other night that it takes a while to get a culture. It is an American culture to have picnics on July 4. It is cultural, I guess, for certain religions to practice a certain meal on a given day. It is within the culture. That means it is preserved. It is something that is accepted. What has happened here in Washington, D.C. is that there is a culture of corruption and cronyism. When we say a culture of corruption and cronyism, that is not something that remotely happened on some given day 2 years ago. That is an everyday practice, and you would assume that it would stop. You would assume that we would disabuse ourselves of that kind of activity. You would assume. The gentleman from Massachusetts mentioned ``their war.'' Well, guess what, it is our war. It is our war. They are our men and women that are laying down their lives right now, whether it be part of our armed services or a contractor or foreign service Americans that are working in the biggest embassy in the world there in Baghdad, in Iraq. Millions upon millions and billions of dollars are being spent. We talk about a culture of corruption and cronyism. I would say to the gentleman from Washington that the other day we talked about four of the big contractors that received no-bid contracts on the Katrina disaster that took place.…”