This blog, if I am lucky, has about 3 readers. It seems statistically improbable that any of you are extremely wealthy, but, if you are, this post is not for you and you should find something else to read.

Now that the millionaires have been excused, we can talk turkey.

Somewhat more than half of us ordinary folks voted for Peter Roskam, George Bush’s lap dog, in the last Congressional election. This was not in our best interests but we did it anyway. Why?

Because the Republican Party has become very clever at getting voters all riled up about what they present as imminent threats to our way of life. In their framework:

• Homosexuals demanding special rights and legal protections threaten to destroy marriage and the family as we know it and and end the free exercise of religion.
• Massive waves of illegal immigrants pouring through our borders threaten to steal our jobs, bring rampant crime to our streets, vote illegally in our elections, and bring an end to our American way of life.
• Armies of Islamic terrorists presently being held at bay in Iraq are just waiting for us to blink so that they can invade our Homeland and destroy us because they hate our freedom.

The Republicans want you to be afraid. And they want you to believe that they are the only ones who will save you from the gays, and the aliens, and the terrorists. They want you to be so afraid that you will vote for them, so that they can maintain power and accomplish their program. They want to scare you stupid - stupid so you won’t catch on to their true agenda, an agenda that is not in your best interests.

What is that agenda? Look back at the last several years under Republican rule and it becomes pretty clear:

• Helping wealthy individuals get wealthier through massive tax cuts while cutting or eliminating or underfunding programs that help the poorest Americans.
• Helping corporations make more money by shifting healthcare and retirement costs to employees, by eliminating consumer safety, occupational, and environmental regulation and enforcement, by making it harder for citizens to bring personal injury suits or file bankruptcy, and by letting industry lobbyists dictate government policy and write legislation in their own interests.
• Enriching war contractors and weapons manufacturers through a program of endless but pointless war.
• Amassing the power needed to keep this all in place by ignoring the will of Congress, by turning the Department of Justice into a campaign organization, by supressing civil liberties and spying on Americans, and by claiming the President’s right to do virtually anything he wants because “we are at war.”

And Peter Roskam is on board for all of this, voting for the Republican agenda over 90% of the time since we elected him.

No, unless we like BushWorld, where the war never ends, where the rich get richer and the poor get screwed, where democracy has become a joke, voting for Peter Roskam makes no sense at all.

Terrorism and immigration and the welfare of familes are legitimate issues that merit careful consideration and deliberate action but voting for Peter Roskam is a good way to ensure that that doesn’t happen. It’s more important for you to continue to be scared so that he can serve his wealthy corporate clientele unimpeded.