A Letter well said to our Senators from a very upset Veteran .

 From a 78 year old (in 2013) Army Veteran. Says it pretty well.

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 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 and 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 $19 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 the country that I deeply love. You have 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