April 3, 2013
Senator Patty Murray
Senator Maria Cantwell
Washington, DC, 20510
Senator Patty Murray
Senator Maria Cantwell
Washington, DC, 20510
Dear Senator:
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| Patty Murray |
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
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 on food stamps – pretty much all Democratic 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 online 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
Bill Schoonover
