(Excellent email)
This is well
written! It will be well worth the two minutes it requires to read this. It is
quite impressive. You can be Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative,
Independent or Libertarian and I bet this will hit a nerve. Our country is in
real trouble. This gentleman is obviously quite smarter than the two senators
he sent it to. All I can say is amen to everything he said. A very articulate
letter sent to the two U.S. Senators from Washington State.
April
3, 2013
Senator
Patty Murray
Senator
Maria Cantwell
Washington,
DC, 20510
Dear
Senator:
I
have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a Command
Sergeant Major, U.S. Army, who died of combat related stresses shortly after
his retirement. It was he who instilled in me those virtues he felt important -
honesty, duty, patriotism and obeying the laws of God and of our various
governments. I have served my country, paid my taxes, worked hard, volunteered
and donated my fair share of money, time and artifacts.
Today,
as I approach my 79th birthday, I am heart-broken when I look at my country and
my government. I shall only point out a very few things abysmally wrong which
you can multiply by a thousand fold. I have calculated that all the money I
have paid in income taxes my entire life cannot even keep the Senate barbershop
open for one year! Only Heaven and a few tight-lipped actuarial types know what
the Senate dining room costs the taxpayers. So please, enjoy your haircuts and
meals on us.
Last
year, the president spent an estimated 1.4 billion on himself and his family.
The vice president spends millions on hotels. They have had 8 vacations so far
this year! And our House of Representatives and Senate have become America's
answer to the Saudi royal family. You have become the "perfumed princes
and princesses" of our country.
In
the middle of the night, you voted in the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a.
"Obama Care," a bill which no more than a handful of senators or
representatives read more than several paragraphs, crammed it down our throats,
and then promptly exempted yourselves from it substituting your own
taxpayer-subsidized golden health care insurance.
You
live exceedingly well, eat and drink as well as the "one per
centers," consistently vote yourselves perks and pay raises while making
3.5 times the average U.S. individual income, and give up nothing while you (as
well as the president and veep) ask us to sacrifice due to sequestration (for
which, of course, you plan to blame the Republicans, anyway).
You
understand very well the only two rules you need to know - (1) How to get
elected, and (2) How to get re-elected. And you do this with the aid of an
eagerly willing and partisan press, speeches permeated with a certain economy
of truth, and by buying the votes of the greedy, the ill-informed and
under-educated citizens (and non-citizens, too, many of whom do vote) who are
looking for a handout rather than a job. Your so-called "safety net"
has become a hammock for the lazy. And, what is it now, about 49 or 50 million
on food stamps - pretty much all Democrat voters - and the program is
absolutely rife with fraud with absolutely no congressional oversight?
I
would offer that you are not entirely to blame. What changed you is the seductive
environment of power in which you have immersed yourselves. It is the nature of
both houses of Congress which requires you to subordinate your virtue in order
to get anything done until you have achieved a leadership role. To paraphrase
President Reagan, it appears that the second oldest profession (politics),
bears a remarkably strong resemblance to the oldest.
As
the hirsute first Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834 -1902), English
historian and moralist, so aptly and accurately stated, "Power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always
bad men." I'm only guessing that this applies to the female sex as well.
Tell me, is there a more corrupt entity in this country than Congress?
While
we middle class people continue to struggle, our government becomes less and
less transparent, more and more bureaucratic, and ever so much more
dictatorial, using Czars and Secretaries to tell us (just to mention a very
few) what kind of light bulbs we must purchase, how much soda or hamburgers we
can eat, what cars we can drive, gasoline to use, and what health care we must
buy. Countless thousands of pages of regulations strangle our businesses
costing the consumer more and more every day.
As
I face my final year, or so, with cancer, my president and my government tell
me "You'll just have to take a pill," while you, Senator, your
colleagues, the president, and other exulted government officials and their
families will get the best possible health care on our tax dollars until you
are called home by your Creator while also enjoying a retirement beyond my
wildest dreams, which of course, you voted for yourselves and we pay for.
The
chances of you reading this letter are practically zero as your staff will not
pass it on, but with a little luck, a form letter response might be generated
by them with an auto signature applied, hoping we will believe that you, our
senator or representative, has heard us and actually cares. This letter will,
however, go on line where many others will have the chance to read one person's
opinion, rightly or wrongly, about this government, its administration and its
senators and representatives.
I
only hope that occasionally you might quietly thank the taxpayer for all the
generous entitlements which you have voted yourselves, for which, by law, we
must pay, unless, of course, it just goes on the $17 trillion national debt for
which your children and ours, and your grandchildren and ours,ad infinitum,
must eventually try to pick up the tab.
My
final thoughts are that it must take a person who has either lost his or her
soul, or conscience, or both, to seek re-election and continue to destroy this
country I deeply love and put it so far in debt that we will never pay it off
while your lot improves by the minute, because of your power. For you, Senator,
will never stand up to the rascals in your House who constantly deceive the
American people. And that, my dear Senator, is how power has corrupted you and
the entire Congress. The only answer to clean up this cesspool is term limits.
This, of course, will kill the goose that lays your golden eggs. And woe be to
him (or her) who would dare to bring it up.
Sincerely,
Bill Schoonover
3096 Angela Lane
Oak Harbor, WA 98277
