My Letter To Eric Cantor

Dear Eric,

I was so glad to get your letter. Your “Dear Fellow Conservative” salutation was a bit surprising but I guess you meant it as a compliment. I really appreciate you calling on me for help with the terrible troubles you face. As you point out in your letter, you need to stop the liberal lies of the left-wing media; you need to push your conservative agenda of lower taxes, eliminating wasteful spending and more freedom; you need to prepare for an epic battle against the liberal Democrats. As we say in Yiddish, Eric you have real tsuris. It’s no wonder you ask me to send you $1,000.

Eric, I feel for you. It is terrible that the liberal media is filled with such liars as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Glen Beck. They are constantly distorting your record. And even your home-town newspaper, that bastion of Left-wing thinking, the Richmond Times-Dispatch is always opposing everything you do or say. It’s about time we showed them the door.

And your conservative agenda of lower taxes, eliminating waste and more freedom, are things that every Right-thinking American would support. They may call it “Voodoo Economics,” Eric, but you and I know that the only way to reduce our national debt is to cut taxes more severely. We have proven in the Reagan, Bush and Bush administrations that cutting taxes actually increases revenue to the Government. (Or we would have proven it if only those leftist Democrats had let the experiment run longer.) So, we’ve got to cut taxes more or else we will never balance the budget.

You are so right! Everybody knows that most government spending is wasteful. And it’s also socialist. Just look at these programs—public broadcasting, public transportation, public this and public that. If they were good capitalist programs, would they call them public? I am so glad that this week you Right-thinking conservatives cut funding for public radio and public TV. That stuff is not only a waste of taxpayer money, but it’s downright subversive. Eric, did you ever watch that Sesame thing? They’ve got all these puppets of different colors and with different accents living happily and singing about numbers and letters. Is this the kind of thing we want our children to learn? They even have this big yellow bird! Give me a break. Eric, thank you for cutting that nonsense.

Now, I know that those lying liberals will accuse you of voting for a lot of wasteful spending during those years when W was president. They will say that you voted year after year for budgets that added trillions of dollars to our national debt. But they just don’t understand. Sometimes in Washington you have to vote for things you disagree with. I know that you strongly oppose deficit spending and would never have voted for those things if you had a choice. But, you had more important things on your mind than the welfare of your constituents. After all, would you be Majority Leader now if you had voted against your Republican president during those eight years?

Your third goal—more freedom—who could oppose it? We all know that our freedoms are constantly under attack by Washington. They are always trying to regulate us. They expect us to provide safe workplaces, even to miners; they expect us to clean up our factories and farms so we don’t pollute the air or water; they expect us to tolerate labor unions. And these are just the tip of the iceberg. We need to get rid of all those Washington regulations. How can a company make a decent profit unless we get free from these meddling bureaucrats in Washington?*

Finally, Eric, there is your epic battle against the liberal Democrats next year. This one will truly be Armageddon. You say that we need to take down Obama and Pelosi, but isn’t it liberal thinking that we must really oppose? We need to fight to the finish against such liberal concepts as feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, caring for the sick, clothing the naked, protecting the powerless in our society, helping the poor or welcoming the stranger. We need to crush out the outrageous liberal ideas that we are responsible for each other or that we are responsible for leaving this world to our children and grandchildren in as good a shape as we received it from the generations that preceded us. We need to stamp out the idea that government has any valid purpose other than protecting our right to make as much money as possible.

Now, comes the bad news, Eric. You asked that I contribute as much as $1,000 to support your campaign to save America. Unfortunately, because of the state of the economy, my wife and I have really had to cut our wasteful spending. (You should be happy that we are following your example.) So, I am sorry to say that we cannot give you any money now.

In any event, Eric, thanks for the letter.


*Eric, you have to be careful with that phrase “more freedom.” You certainly wouldn’t want people to think you supported the freedom to marry who you want or the freedom of women to control their own bodies!