SEVENTY-NINE AND RIGHT ON!

This letter is an instant classic.  It should be read aloud on the
                floor of both houses of Congress.  It should be published on the front
                page of every newspaper of any repute, and read into the Library of Congress.

You will be glad you read this letter. Please feel free to share !!
It will be well worth the 3 or 4 minutes it requires to read this.
It is quite impressive.
You can be Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, Independent or Libertarian and I'll bet this will hit a nerve.
 Our country is in real trouble.   This gentleman is obviously smarter than the two senators to whom he sent it.

 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
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 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