April 3, 2013
TO:
Senator Patty Murray
Senator Maria Cantwell
Washington, DC , 20510
Dear Senators:
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
during 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. Obamacare," 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
percenters," 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 dollars on
food stamps - to pretty much all Democrat voters - and the program is
absolutely rife with fraud and 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 for
yourselves, for which, by law, we must pay, unless, of course, they just
go 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 (that 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, would 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
No comments:
Post a Comment