Hello to idiotic spending. Hello to the New Vietnam - an ongoing war with an indistinct cause or goal that will take billions of dollars and many lives, with no end in sight. Goodbye to insurance reform or any substantive change in anything. They can push through anything they want.

I don't know if I have a right to complain - I did vote for a Republican Congressman. But the Democrats weren't going to take the House, and frankly, the Democrat running in my district would have been MORE detrimental to the cause of righteousness than the Republican.

But when I see that my health insurance premiums are doubling next year - not rising the standard 25 percent of everyone else's, but actually doubling - I'm concerned that by voting in one party to control everything, we've left little chance for that party's major benefactors to receive any kind of real oversight. 

It amazes me, really. Enron, Worldcom, the insurance industry... These are the bugaboos of national news, and seven times out of ten, they were hand-in-glove with the Republicans. Are we so afraid of Democratic foreign policy that we're willing to let these folks get away with everything? Apparently so.

Oh, but the Democrats would tax us, they scream. Well, according to my calculations, I will pay more in health insurance premiums next year than federal and state income tax combined. I'll happily return my pitiful tax cut if they'll crack down on the insurance companies.

I think the climate of politics is changing. Ten years ago, you could not have run a vicious, personal attack campaign against a widow who had lost her husband and son in a terrible plane crash two years before - and won. An fortysomething man couldn't have attacked a sixtysomething woman on SENIOR issues and won. 

It's as bizarre as a third-party candidate attacking Vice President Gore on environmental issues and pulling away enough votes to kill his chances. Good liberals will never forgive Ralph Nader. He single-handedly did more damage to his own causes - consumer rights and the environment - than we will ever be able to calculate.

On the flip side, things in my home state of Illinois are looking up. The Democrats took back the state Senate after 10 years, and they kept the state House. They elected a Democratic governor for the first time in 30 years, and he brings with him a group of young, talented Dems for attorney general, secretary of state and almost every other office, with the exception of treasurer.

I wonder if Illinois can secede from the U.S. and form our own country.

Hypocrite alert: wasn't I just saying that one-party control is a bad thing? Yes, that's true. Sometimes it's easy to overlook the danger of one-party control when it's your party. Perhaps Illinois would be better off with a more equal balance, even if it means some Republicans in charge. Of the choices we had, I can't imagine who we should have picked to provide that balance.

Granted, in Illinois, a Democrat is an unusual beast. He's a fiscal moderate and often a social conservative. He probably owes favors in Chicago, since it's impossible to get elected without Chicago. Duh - about half the state population lives there. But he's a lot better than the fire-breathing, corrupt-through-the-pants-pockets Republicans. The biggest divide in Illinois isn't between the Republicans and the Democrats, it's between Chicago and "downstate" - otherwise known as the rest of the state. One of the main reasons U.S. Rep. Rod Blagojevich beat attorney general Jim Ryan was that Blagojevich spent more time "downstate" than any candidate in recent memory. He may be from Chicago - aren't they all? - but he remembered that the rest of the state counts, too. So they handed him the governor's mansion and a $2 billion deficit.

When I watch CNN today, I feel like crying. Instead of real money for education, an attempt to solve the country's economic woes and a sane foreign policy, we've got Back-To-The-Eighties Day in Washington. Only this time, we're not up against a Soviet Union with enough internal problems to keep itself busy and leaders with enough sense to keep them from killing us. We're up against a whole world that's growing more pissed off every day at our arrogance and warmongering. They have weapons and hatred. Bad combination.

But what bothers me most is the not-so-gradual erosion of the system of checks and balances. The Patriot Act increased the power of the executive branch to ludicrous levels, with John Ashcroft as head of the Gestapo and Rumsfeld as Warmonger-in-Chief.

With the Republicans taking hold of both House and Senate, there is no effective check on the executive branch at all. Bush can push through anything he wants. I hold out no great hope that the Supreme Court will be any kind of effective check, since its power has been waning as it makes increasingly partisan decisions. The only issue on which it has seen fit to challenge King Shrub is the death penalty.

With this erosion of checks and balances, we are left only with the press. As a card-carrying member of the Fourth Estate, I'd like to hold out hope that we can provide some accountability in Washington. But with all the First Amendment violations being sanctioned daily by Homeland Security nonsense - with no apparent outcry from the press, except an increasingly flailing ACLU - you certainly can't count on the press as a real counter to this growing power. Half the papers in the country and all the TV stations are now owned by conglomerates themselves. People scream about the liberal press, but they forget that the guys who OWN the papers are conservatives in three-piece suits. To a man.

People will say I'm being Chicken Little, ranting at the sky. But I honestly feel we're well on our way to destroying our representative democracy. It's not just the Republicans taking over, although that does make me itch. In the past few years, we've seen how easy it is to tear down a system, one that's survived for 226 years. The Romans lasted a lot longer than that, but they still fell to the Visigoths when they stopped paying attention to what made their society work. 

All it took was a couple of yahoos driving planes in a building. That's all it took to make us sell out the only part of the system that still worked like it was supposed to - the checks and balances that made our government responsible to the people.

I won't say the Founding Fathers are crying over the Republican victory in Washington. But they might be crying over our willingness to give it to them, to choose our personal safety over everything worth fighting for.

Maybe it isn't time to drink the Kool-Aid yet. After all, as one of my fellow subversives put it, the Republicans now have no one to blame when things go south. They have two years to completely screw up and drive us further into the ground. Then we'll see who's drinking the Kool-Aid, come 2004.