The Weekly Screed (#661)

Why is this man bellyaching?
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Bill Schoonover is alive and cancerous, and living in Oak Harbor, Washington. I know about Bill because Judy, my Republican friend in Fort Myers, is hooked into the Right-Wing Chain Letter Network. Judy thoughtfully shared with me one of Bill’s frequent polemics to U.S. Senators — this one to the two Democrats in his home state, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell.

Bill’s recent primal scream, like previous tirades to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D- Cal.) and Cong. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), is a tissue of reactionary talking points that can’t be corroborated in any reliable news report or public document. His most damning charge is the $1.4 billion that President Obama and his family apparently spend on office supplies, dinner parties, personal luxuries and dog-walking.

This claim is shattered by a cursory peek into a few fact-checking sites, which explain that the $1.4 billion covers all the security, living and travel expenses normal to the operation of the White House, year-to-year, regardless of who lives there. Half, $800 million, is the Secret Service budget. The Obama White House bill has been as much as $1.4 billion in a year, but this marks a 12.5-percent cut compared to his predecessor, George W. Bush, who cracked $1.6 billion in 2008.

Schoonover also thinks Obama took too much vacation — 92 days in five years. Let’s ignore the fact that no president, wherever he goes, is ever truly on vacation, and compare Obama’s escapes to a few forebears. LBJ, in less than six years, fled the White House for 484 days. Ronald Reagan, in eight years, took 436 vacation days. In only one term — during the Civil War! — Abe Lincoln took off a whole year. But the all time champ is, of course…

… Surprise! John Adams, who took eight months off in 1799. But the runner-up is George W. Bush, who — in eight years — spent 1,020 days on the Crawford ranch or in Kennebunkport, or at Camp David, the presidential hideaway built by our golfingest White House dweller ever, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

As I did all this Obama-parsing, my curiosity kept shifting to the author of those virulent poison-pen letters from tranquil, picturesque Oak Harbor. How did William P. Schoonover become — I wondered — one of the most embittered and cantankerous people in America? How have we tortured this poor man?

Bill’s oeuvre contains some of the most scurrilous insults I’ve encountered in America’s political discourse. He calls all “Democrat voters” (note the pejorative adjectival form) “greedy, ill-informed, under-educated and lazy… looking for a handout rather than a job.” Bill labels the Democratic Party “the most corrupt, vile organization in this country.” (But he also says that about the entire Congress.)

Despite his obvious GOP allegiance, Bill’s Web-rants are typically introduced as follows: “You can be a Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, Independent or Libertarian and I bet this will hit a nerve. Our country is in real trouble. This gentleman is obviously smarter than the two senators he sent it to.”

Bill likes to call President Obama “that piece of garbage in the White House.” His term of general opprobrium for government officials is, simply, “scum,” but Congress, in particular is “a cesspool of liars, thieves, inside traders, traitors, drunks… criminals, and other low level swine.”

Besides the President, Bill holds a few other officeholders in particular contempt. He called the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D- W.Va.) “an uncommon thief,” and he threw his thesaurus at Sen. Boxer, “a virago, termagant, harridan, nag, scold or shrew, unfit for your position, regardless of the support of the unwashed…”

Because Bill seems to have suffered so cruelly at the hands of Uncle Sam and “that untreated sewage pond we call Congress,” I couldn’t resist tracking him around the Web to find out what, exactly, our republic has done to this battered, beaten and bedraggled cynic to merit his periodic eructions of venom.

Considering his absence of epistolary discipline, I was surprised by Bill’s boast of four decades’ service in the U.S. military. Various websites place Lt. Col. (ret.) Schoonover in the Army, Navy and Marines. But Bill’s G.I roots go even deeper. He was a member of the Class of ‘53 at Heidelberg High, a prep school — in the picture-postcard Rhineland city of Heidelberg — operated by the Dept. of Defense for children of U.S. overseas armed forces.

Bill, obviously, was a “lifer” in the U.S. military. The Web offers no indication that Bill ever saw combat, but I was able to verify one of his palmier deployments — to the U.S. Army’s 7794th Signal Depot in Saumur, a beautiful hillside village in France’s chateau-dotted Loire Valley wine country. 

Bill retired to Oak Harbor, on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. I checked out real estate there and saw some nice homes in the $2-6 million range. I’m sure that Bill — and his lovely wife, Ruth — aren’t living high enough off the federal hog to own one of those palaces. But I do wonder why — after earning virtually every buck of his life from the government, including regular salary hikes required by Pentagon seniority and rubber-stamped by a generous Congress (“the Mafia on steroids”) —  Bill hates his Uncle Sugar so passionately. By my estimate, based on published Pentagon pay scales, Bill — with 40 years in the service — is collecting a pension equal to 100 percent of his last paycheck. That could be as little as $66,000 a year or as much as $230,000, depending on Bill’s final rank.

This would not include any “double-dip” (as much as $18,850) Bill might have earned by serving a few extra light-duty years in the Reserves.

Oddly, one of Bill’s pet peeves is the Affordable Care Act, not just because it “crams” health care down the gullets of the unworthy uninsured, but because of its sheer hypocrisy. The “perfumed princes and princesses” in Congress who launched Obamacare have slyly exempted themselves. Bill bellyaches that they enjoy, instead, “your own taxpayer-subsidized golden heath care insurance.”

Bill’s got a point there. Federal officeholders belong to a single-payer system that bypasses the vagaries, injustices and heartless bureaucracy endemic to the free-market health insurance cartel, which is now the heart of the Affordable Care Act.

Trouble is, Bill Schoonover, while denouncing it virulently, is also safe from Obamacare. As a 40-year vet, he’s covered by not one but two socialist-inspired single-payer forms of “taxpayer-subsidized golden heath care insurance.” One is called Medicare; the other — regarded as the best, most cost-effective health care system in the United States — is the Veterans Administration.

Bill, who’s been “dying” of cancer for at least ten months (or so he says on the Internet), has never paid a dollar out-of-pocket for health care. He never will. He joined the Navy (or Army, or Marines) and saw the world, enjoyed a lively, peripatetic career on at least two continents and retired to one of the leafiest, most exclusive white enclaves in the Pacific Northwest, all the while glued — and sucking irremovably — to the magnanimous tit of the government he regards as the most vile, corrupt organization on the face of his angry God’s earth.