Dear Senator-Elect Brown:
I proudly voted for Barack Obama last fall and built and painted a giant 10 x 8 foot election sign on the side of our house before the general election.
But frankly, his decision to give no-strings-attached gobs of 100s of billions of dollars to the same billionaires who put this country into a deep recession and double digit unemployment and the highest foreclosure rate since the Great Depression was weak tea for me.
Like you, I am a Masshole, a native of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the ancestral home of the Massachusett, Nipmuck and the Wampanoag, and I am dismayed about several of your statements prior to being made Senate-elect for my Commonwealth of Massachusetts, particularly involving your support of human torture.
Unlike some of my fellow native Masshole friends and acquaintances, I am a Marxist and I am quite proud in saying that. I believe in meritocracy when it comes to professions and professional advancement, especially as it applies to women and anyone who is considered ... err ... of non-white Anglo Saxon Protestant ilk, or someone who is gay. Meritocracy is supposed to mean what it says, not like Humpty Dumpty says in "Through the Looking Glass," whatever Humpty Dumpty means it to say at that particular moment.
I wish to live in a United States that is not stained by racism and sexism and homophobia and where the injured, old and unfortunate due to past insults going back years, decades or centuries are not still kept down perniciously and considered underclass and are told to be glad for the crumbs "we" give them or the beatings will continue until morale improves.
I do not buy into the idea that my self-worth is enhanced by the extent to which I can kick someone else with impunity. Nor is my ego so fragile that I feel threatened if somebody happens to make more money than me because of the career they have chosen. As a writer, I deliberately chose a path I knew would not make much money because I enjoy the freedom of not having to make money and fulfill all the demands that such a job entails.
I am at least a fifth generation native of Massachusetts and my family is from about 15 miles from your home in Wrentham. I now live in Maine, a former colony of Massachusetts.
As a Masshole, I'm not particularly pleased to learn that you have been running around saying proudly that waterboarding a bound, helpless human being is not torture, when the U.S. Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law explicitly say that it is torture. Your statement speaks ill of your intelligence and morality. It certainly does not demonstrate your understanding of the U.S. Constitution. But hey, that's Wrentham for you. Maybe people were peeing too much in Lake Pearl when you were learning the butterfly.
I can only guess you decided that puffing up your chest in one or all of your five houses and bragging about how you would like to torture children is the new "No New Taxes" you thought would play well among the mentally and morally out to lunch of Massachusetts. It may have gotten you some votes, but no more than if you said that brown-skinned children in your town should be round up and dropped off in Plainfield or Attleborough. It is the same sentiment, the same cloying and bigoted appeal to the lowest common denominator.
As a note of advice. Guys who brag about how they think torturing children makes their dick hard, and campaign on this hoping it makes my dick hard, are not the kind of folks I want peeing in my pool, even when I'm not looking, even if unlike you, I don't have a pool to pee in. Stay away from my pool.
I hope you reconsider your statements on this issue on behalf of the moral integrity of the Commonwealth.