Is this the country we’ll all be left with?

Republican politicians, along with the money-changers that own the GOP and a few petty wannabes, are among the biggest freeloaders in history. If their greed were to prevail, adult Americans would be as negligent in meeting their obligations as is a dine-and-dash petty thief sticking a restaurant waitress with the tab.

The younger generation is stuck with a huge bill of a rotting and rusting national infrastructure, a trashed environment, families that cannot afford health care, shortchanged educations, jobs moved to low-standard-of-living countries, the destruction of organized labor's defense of the middle class, military deployment of young Americans to protect a global oil empire, the roadblock of renewable energy, blowing the

$4.5 trillion that government owes to Social Security and other trust funds, leaving behind the largest debt in history that is money run into the pockets of wealthy money-changers that pull the Republican's strings.

This batch of Republicans' greed and staggering disregard has mashed the seed corn of the future into booze and now, drunk with power, they make pratfall-comedy of the people's business: the crazy give-a-handgun-to-a-schizophrenic bill, decide who can marry whom, protect animal abusers, turn Iowa's highest court into a religious tribunal of inquisition, make sewers of our rivers and streams, wage war on doves, and sprinkle around some atomic plants awaiting future disasters from which they plan to be long gone.

Sam Osborne

West Branch