Hey, Dick, Whatcha Doin' With that Knife in Your Hand?

Senator Durbin:

I cannot tell you how disconcerting it is to me, as a Democratic Party precinct committeeman in Illinois, to hear you actively espousing cuts to Social Security. As you must know, Social Security has never contributed a single penny to the national debt except in its role to provide an excuse for sundry administrations since Reagan to misappropriate its surpluses in order to disguise the staggering size of their profligate deficits.

It is those largely Republican deficits that have swollen the national debt to nearly unmanageable proportions and it is that national debt that they have imposed that they are attempting to use as a false justification to steal what Americans have paid for through their payroll taxes for the past thirty years. You seem to be a willing accomplice to that theft in your participation with the so called "Gang of Six", which is nothing but a mechanism by which to abdicate the Senate majority that the voters have, perhaps foolishly, given you.

You are selling the President's budget proposals as the "other side of the spectrum" from the rapacious and cruel proposals put up by Rep. Paul Ryan. I'll tell you, Senator, you must be regarding a much narrower spectrum than that which I perceive. You have said that cutting Social Security represents an obligation that you have to senior citizens. That is such a weak and laughably false justification that you should be required to do public penance to disassociate yourself from it.

Then, perhaps most egregiously, you stupidly play into the Republican agenda with your espousal of means testing Social Security. That is the first step in converting Social Security from an insurance policy to a welfare program, thus ensuring its eventual demise.

This initiative is clearly an attempt at the theft of the Social Security surplus, since any change to the compact with the American People that Social Security represents is only to be considered as a last ditch emergency measure. While cuts to the disgustingly bloated military budget are entertained with only a timid and whispering suggestion, and the restoration of a just, progressive taxation is treated as anathema, you are very far from being at the end of your options.

Of course, I don't for a moment suppose that you have initiated such action on your own, as I see the hand of the White House pulling your string in this matter. That being the case, they will share your loss of support.

I do not mean to threaten you with the loss of my support, and that which I can garner through my office and influence in the Party. I am serving notice that you have already lost it, as has President Obama, and it shall not be restored until it is earned anew with a vigorous defense of the hard won social compact represented by Social Security and Medicare. There must also be a reassertion of the power and leadership that is conferred upon the Democratic Party by virtue of the majority it holds in the Senate. The charade you put on in showing the Senate Democrats to be no more than a weak and ineffectual pro forma speed bump to the House majority is unseemly and embarrassing to any real Democrat, nay, American.

You should know that attempts to sell yourself as the only alternative to Republican government are lost on me while you act as their devoted ally. The forwarding of excuses for this behavior, be they claims of abject stupidity, wink and nod strategies or simply an admission of collusion with Republican aims will similarly be looked upon as so much distracting noise. Claims that they are playing checkers while you are playing chess do not diminish the stark realization that they are playing checkers while you are playing "possum.

Stand up and show some backbone in issues that are well worth defending. To do otherwise is to tell the electorate that there really is no utility in having you around.

John J. Sanchez Jr.