An Open Letter to SEN Wyden

My dear Senator;

I'm dreadfully afraid to hear that you appear to have been drinking heavily. At least, I hope that is the reason your name appeared in the Oregonian coupled with SEN Ryan in some sort of scheme to "reform" Medicare.

Because if you ARE compos mentis I find this hard to explain. We elected you based on what we understood as your liberal principles, which include a belief that one cardinal purpose for which governments are instituted among Men is to aid those who are in difficulty. Which is, still, the principle behind such programs as Medicare.

Now given that SEN Ryan has made much of his belief that government has no such brief, and that his so-called "plan" consisted of a thinly-veiled attempt to "reform" Medicare into largesse for private insurers, I find it appalling that I find your name, a name I respected as a doughty fighter for liberal values, lending respectability to the latest Ryan scheme. If not inspired by ethanol I hope, at least, that you are attempting to infiltrate the enemy camp in order to dynamite their supplies. Given the extent to which the GOP and SEN Ryan have gone over to the raze-the-New-Deal-social-contract I can find no other rational explanation for the news of this arrangement.

Sent in hopes that with the dawn sobriety and a cold drink of water will find you abjuring the Gilded Age fantasies of SEN Ryan and a return to the bedrock principles of liberalism that have served our country so well since the days of FDR.

Yours concernedly,

John L. Lawes

Update 12/16: (Basilbeast has corrected my error: the GOP fathead-in-question is a Congressman, so I was incorrect in not identifying him as "REP" Ryan. I leave the original missive as I sent it, however, and can only suspect that the amount of drink I had taken upon reading of my Senator's betrayal affected my own judgment.)

Update 12/17: Krugman, predictably, says the same thing only better.