Anybody Get the "I'm Tired" Email Yet?

As I've said before, I'm on some pretty oddball mailing lists, and one of the things that came to me last week was what is apparently a viral email essay written by a guy named Robert Hall (and no, it's not the actor from CSI, even though it purports to be) who is allegedly a Marine Corps veteran and five-term Massachusetts state senator.

It starts out with the title "I'm 63 and I'm Tired", and then it gets into the nitty-gritty:

I'm 63. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked hard since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.
I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.
I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought Mc Mansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money.

And it goes on and on with anti-Islamic and racist screeds and a bunch of phony-assed I-pulled-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps kind of crap.

You may, if you wish, see the whole thing over at Snopes, whose take on it is that it is true (that Robert Hall said it) but that it was sometimes wrongly attributed to the actor guy Robert Hall who plays the coroner on CSI.

The list that this was sent to is mostly Vietnam veterans of the Rethug-Asshole stripe, but there are a couple of liberals besides me on it and one of them responded to this crap with his own lambaste of the Glenn Beck/Bill Orally/Faux News gobbling morons who believe this shit.

Which, of course, then prompted a flurry of "If you don't like it here why don't you get out you fucking commie!" responses, with North Korea pretty much heading the list of potential new homelands for us commie-nazi-socialist-atheist-pinko liberals.

Naturally I couldn't just sit by and do nothing (but you knew that already). Here is my response to the list:

I have a simple question: Why does this joker claims that the economy is so bad he can't retire, if he's worked every day of his life and owns outright a condo worth 250k?
A lot of people, me among them, have retired and are doing fine on what I suspect is a lot less retirement income than this Robert Hall has available to him.
I suspect that this whole piece of raving is a little long on exaggeration and a little short on actual facts.
But what you can expect from a former politician (he was a Massachusetts state senator) whose political party is not given but which I would bet good money is Republican?
In Glennbeckistan, though (as Winston Churchill so famously said under different circumstances), facts are such precious and fragile things that they must constantly be protected with a bodyguard of lies...
And those of you who are parroting the "if you don't like it here, get out" line: It appears that you are the ones who don't like it here, since you are doing all the complaining. Why don't YOU get out? May I suggest the Ayn-Rand-Libertarian paradise of Somalia as a potential new home base for you, where there are no taxes and no government intervention in your life because there is ... no government.
Just what you want...

I know, it's too easy. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. But so what? It's still fun.