Like the military, family values is a thing meant to put some backbone into the poor and the working class, two notoriously spineless groups of people who exist as fodder for people who want to make jokes about Walmart patrons and NASCAR fans.

When you hear the words "family values," you need to remember that those values are not for the wealthy. They're for you, another present from the folks who wrote the employee handbook at your job.

A guy like Newt Gingrich, sure he's been married a bunch of times. Sure, he's gotta little trouble finding his own bed at night. Sure, he's had problems over shadily obtained money, but none of that counts.

The guy's got a $200 haircut. You, ya schmuck, you got a $12-an-hour job and an $8 haircut. Your wife buys those three-pairs-for-$5-panties. You got one more kid than you can "afford."

You NEED family values. If you screw around on your husband and he bounces you, how you gonna survive on a $10-an-hour grocery store cashier paycheck and the ex-hubby's $75-a-week child support? You're not, that's how, so you need a big old spoonful of family values to keep you on your own mattress, and your hubby may need to swallow a bitter pill of reconciliation.

Children out of wedlock? If you started out poor, there's no surer ticket to even more delightful poverty. You gotta have some values. Keep that dress down! Keep that zipper up! Rich people can sow the country with their children (legalized and otherwise), and what's the harm? Your out-of-wedlock kids cost the whole country welfare money and Head Start money and housing project money. What's the worst thing that happens if some CEO has one kid without being married? One more tuition to Harvard, right?

That's why you NEED a big tacky-ass mural of the Ten Commandments in the hallway of the high school in your seedy little part of town. You need it to remind you that you're so life-on-the-edge poor that you better pay attention to the rules.

You need some flag, too. You need it on the bumper of your 11-year-old pick-up truck, and you need it on your T-shirt, and you need it draped over your boy's coffin when he gets the free ride home from Afghanistan. What's a rich woman need a flag for? Her money's in the Caribbean. If a rich guy wants to put a flag on something, he puts a flag pin in the buttonhole of the senator he just bought.

They do the same thing in those Muslim countries. The poor people are encouraged to get all cranked-up on Allah and Jihad so they won't notice that the government is three crazy guys who think the Holocaust is some kind of sad Jewish fairy tale.

So, when some gibbering yahoo running for office starts telling you about family values and flags and Jesus, remember the candidate in question is just trying to remind you that you are too poor to make mistakes and he is not. He's also trying to remind you that if you vote for Jesus and the flag, then Jesus and the flag is all you're going to get, along with a good slap to keep you in line.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.