Patty Murray, by acting stunned, surprised and outraged over AIG’s bonus payments to some of their executives and employees, is simply trying to divert attention away from her agreement to and acceptance of those very same bonus payments.

She, along with all Democrat party followers and some Republicans, voted 74 to 25 to pay out taxpayer dollars, not even collected yet, to bail out and rescue financial institutions. They selected the ones to “save” and allowed others to collapse and to date, nobody has any idea what criteria was used to do that.

AIG as it turns out does, in fact, handle much of Congress’s retirement accounts and has also given its largest campaign donations to Chris Dodd and Barack Obama. Is this coincidence? Nobody knows. When I sent Senator Murray a letter protesting the use of taxpayer dollars on bailing out private business, I received a “form letter” reply which also indicated she had indeed read and understood the bill in its entirety. Now, we are to believe that she didn’t “know about” the bonuses when that part of the legislation was inserted by Chris Dodd at the “administration’s” request before it was passed into law.

It should be fairly obvious that Senator Murray either 1. lied about reading the legislation before it was passed or 2. lied about getting caught knowing about the legislation with Dodd’s addition firmly in place, and as we all know from popularity t.v., the best way to divert attention when caught in a lie is act as emotionally as possible and turn the attention to the scapegoat villain, in this case, AIG.

Senator Murray should be ashamed of herself, but she isn’t, for even contemplating using public money to bail out private businesses. On top of that outrage, she is supporting the idea that the government can selectively pick out individual citizens to “tax.” Perhaps, Congress should reread history about what the Boston Tea Party was all about.

Tax dollars are collected to ensure that the federal government with its limited activities can operate. Federal government has stepped way over the lines of its Constitutional powers with the help of Senators like Ms. Murray.

Catherine Paxton

Arlington