On April 15, tax day, thousands of people around the country demonstrated in the streets, protesting high taxes and out of control government spending. They called it a Tea Party. Taxed Enough Already. And they probably are, but it’s their own damn fault.

Who are these people? I am sure there are a variety of types among them, but if you used a Venn diagram with two circles and in one circle you put the anti-abortion, anti-gay people and in the other you put the I-love-my-guns-more-than-you-love-your-mother people, the circles would almost completely overlap. They are the same people who are in favor of passing an abortion ban. Their president, some bumper stickers say, is Charlton Heston and they vote. These are the same people who have voted us into this mess.

These are the people who have been tricked by the Repooblican Party into voting against their own best interests for the last 30 years. It’s a shell game. People who care about virtually nothing except getting money (no matter how they do it) and keeping money have fooled a bunch of poor working and middle class fools into voting to let them do it.

This element in society, much of it born with money, some of it comprised of people who want to rub shoulders with those who were born with money so bad they will screw anybody to reach that goal – will use any means possible to achieve its goal, which is acquiring and keeping money.

They have tricked, bullied and screwed the rest of us into a corner. They have done it by stirring up passions – religious, sexual, racial – and getting us to vote for other poor suckers or evil cretins, whatever the case may be, who go to state legislatures or Congress and proceed to make bad law.

Here’s what happens when we send a simpleton, who really believes that it is the government’s right to control people’s personal sexual decisions, to make laws. Bad laws are made. Good laws are dismantled. No one responsible is watching the cookie jar, because everybody is looking through the keyhole into the bedroom.

For thirty years, these people have been going to Congress and attempting to legislate sexual morality and ignoring the fact that a whole other area of morality – financial morality – was being completely deregulated. By the way, regulation is a fancy word for laws. So, while the country fretted over other people’s sex lives, the financial systems at the very foundation of America’s economy were deregulated to the point that they have unraveled. We left the rats in charge of the bread box and we have been left with crumbs.

The people demonstrating in the streets in support of the Tea Party are the very people who voted us into this mess.