Posted on 10/07/2013 8:31:24 AM PDT by Twotone
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. "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 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 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 exalted 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
Roger that. Murray and Cantwell could give two craps about the letter writer(righter!). Cantwell won’t have to worry about money in any case. She could refuse to take any senatorial retirement money and she’s still set for life. Maybe she could move to Dumbassistan. Or the Island of Moronica.
This is OK as far as it goes.
However the tables will get turned when the “We The People” who volunteered to take charge of the USA through its main charter, the Constitution, actually DO that again.
They can complain till they are blue in the face about what Senators do to get re-elected, but until these shenanigans of Senators actually begin to fall on deaf ears, “We The People” are getting just what they invited.
The USA started off well because most of its people had a firm sense of a second, larger, more powerful kingdom to which they belonged or at least owed some sort of allegiance. This was the kingdom of God. Little by little the people have let the infernal powers steal their allegiance to this larger kingdom away. The result: they expect the earthly kingdom to do what only God’s could. It because a humongous mess, a train wreck, a nemesis. And God jolly well knows it and intends the chaos to be a wake up call. The gospel never vanished. Only the esteem in which it was held, dwindled.
Nicely phrased.
And yet we cannot stop here. We must get a larger view. Why would anybody want to work, ever, if they could game the system instead.
That involves a matter of honor, and honor comes from the Creator. And I’ve got to do that myself too or I become a hypocrite... so bye for now.
As the USA becomes, with every new revelation of corruption, the Babylon foretold by the last book of the Bible, Revelation, godly people can only pray fervently that these are the last days before Judgment Day. Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus!
” I wonder what would happen if the Senate received a few million copies of it, with an ‘I agree’ on top.”
Good idea...Thank you for sharing.
I remember THAT letter, but didn’t remember the author’s name. Maybe he’s moved to Washington state. ;-)
As obviously, they don't work. But I disagree about their "gaming the system." My cynical viewpoint is that it is no accident that the system is set up intentionally to support the lazy worthless parasites that it does. That the welfare system is designed to create dependency and reliably Democratic voters.
“how so many Americans cannot see his antics is beyond me”
I believe there are two explanations for that: 1) those who cannot see and, 2) those who will not see.
1) Can not see - The communists have controlled education and entertainment for decades. Too many people are ignorant and morally corrupt.
2) Will not see - Those lazy, selfish people have been bought. As long as their food stamps and other perks roll in, they don’t care to see where the money comes from or the damage being done.
The house at this address is valued at around $600,000. That is not the house of a median income person; as a result, it rings a little false for this person to be complaining about the high salaries of politicians.
I do like the sentiment, however. I wish this letter were verifiable.
From the frying pan into the fire! lol
The author says it all.
America’s political elite live very much like the kings and queens they believe they are. For the great majority of them, once they cross the Potomac into their cushy, “Senator/Congressmember-for-life” existence, their singular goal.. above all.. is preservation of that lofty status for themselves.
Snopes verifies its attribution.
How many years ago did he buy the house? My mother and father bought their house almost fifty years ago; my mother still lives there, a widow for forty years with never more than a median income, and it’s valued at more than 600,000.
Thanks! Twotone needs to know. :-)
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/schoonover.asp
He has written several and they are verified by Snopes.
I feel like you, term limits.
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