Richard Dickerson

The New York Times (on February 16, 2010) published a series of reader letters to the editor under the banner "What the Tea Party Movement Wants".

One letter writer, Richard Dickinson of Glendale, California, gave himself a nice pat on the back for his "more than 35 years in public service".

I am a lowly private sector Tea Partier, and I hope Mr. Dickinson will forgive me for saying I don't regard him as a "Public Servant" at all, but rather as a "government employee"; and that the primary problem with the American economy is that there are too many overpaid, unproductive government employees.

I know government employees would like to elevate their stature to "public servant" or something even higher like shepherd, with the rest of us as their lost sheep.

But the truth is that government employees are sitting back smugly collecting their benefits and counting their retirement dollars, when much of America is unemployed, homeless, and eating cat food; and therefore I suggest government employees such as Richard Dickinson should just be thankful (for once in their miserable lives) for what they have, instead of fomenting plans to bleed more cash out of the American people.

I wonder, do we ever hear retired farmers telling us they spent "more than 35 years in agricultural service"?

Do we hear retired doctors say they spent "more than 35 years in medical service"?

This may seem like a small issue, but it's really the primary reason Americans have completely rejected the Obama health care plan. From President Obama all the way down to the lowest line level drone like Richard Dickinson, government employees feel the need to sugarcoat everything they say, elevate their status, and never ever never get down to business and straight talk.

It's interesting we never hear anyone in the private sector bragging about their "more than 35 years in private service"?

It's really pretty scary to see "public servants" like Richard Dickinson trying to take away our free market choices in everything from retirement plans to health insurance.

I feel pretty inadequate trying to communicate with a guy like Richard Dickinson, because I speak only English, and it's obvious to me that he doesn't understand English.

I mean, how do I explain to Richard Dickinson that I am ok with the government running Grand Canyon National Park, but I don't want the government running health care?

How do I explain to Richard Dickinson that millions of other Tea Partiers feel the same way as me?

Sadly, we hear the same twisted arguments from the Richard Dickinsons of the world over and over. Normally they go something like this -- "so you don't want Police, you don't want Fire Departments, you don't want roads, you don't want water and sewage."

How ever does one explain to the Richard Dickinsons of the world that Police, Fire, roads, and public works are ok, but we don't want government health care?

You can't. You really can't.

As I said, the real servants are working in the private sector. Did you ever try to get a government employee to keep their office open an extra 5 minutes after 5 o'clock or on Saturday?

Government employees, such as Mr. Dickerson are well paid, receive sustantially better benefit packages than persons in the private sector, have better job security, and in general are less productive.

Here's the point. I didn't go out and do research on Richard Dickerson; he wrote a letter to the New York Times and touted his former government employee status as though it somehow gives moral superiority to his argument -- being a lazy, unproductive, overpaid government slug.

His letter then makes the following moronic statement -- "I have no problem paying more for the society that I live in, and no problem helping pay for a bigger and better society for our grandkids. This is no longer a country of prairie schooners."

Uh huh . . . what he really means is that I have no problem with everyone paying more for the government to shape our society according to the specifications of ex "public servants" such as myself.

Also, I wonder if Mr. Dickerson is somehow trying to convince us that "government" and "society" are one and the same, and the government, as funded with our tax payer dollars, is the only mechanism for producing a "better society"?

Finally, his statement that "This is no longer a country of prairie schooners" is just weird and more or less reflects on the quality of the editorial staff at the New York Times, but I'll have a crack at it anyway.

I suppose, in the view of Mr. Dickerson, a bigger, better, prairie schooner free society would consist of more more fat bottomed government employees, more public buildings, more government and the rest of us, including the Tea Partiers, working as his private slaves to support the whole top heavy hierarchy.

In conclusion, I would like to talk about a phenomenon I call the "dumb government employee stare". This happens when you tell a government employee what you want and then he turns to you and says what he thinks you should want or he just replaces what you said with some lie, or made up story, or fabrication; and then, since government employees don't have any real work to do, when you correct him, he just patiently turns back to you and repeats the same fabrication again.

He can do it all day with you. He doesn't care. He's getting paid whether he helps you or not; and he figures it's better to not help you anyway, because a dissatisfied customer (from the government perspective) is a customer who goes away and doesn't come back; and that means he can go back to watching porn, or playing tiddly winks, or whatever government employees do when they are not helping anyone, which is pretty much most of the time.

And then, until you join a tea party group, the government employees don't really care what you do, so long as you are not bothering them. But when you finally do start to make them feel threatened about their benefits and their retirement money and their slovenly work habits, then a few of them will write indignant letters to large regional newspapers like the New York Times and try to frame themselves up as though they are comparable to Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer or Mahatma Gandhi; but of course they are not. They're just a bunch of lazy incompetent slobs who would eat until they exploded if we let them.

Now they feel threatened and they are whining to the media about their public service.

What a joke!!!