The worst thing about the oil leak, assuming you don’t live and work in the Gulf, was having to keep viewing the same stuff on TV day in and day out for months on end.  It got so bad, I began seeing the undersea footage, the oily pelican and Thad Allen, in my dreams.

Speaking of Mr. Allen, if he’s retired from the Coast Guard, why does he get to wear his uniform on camera?  I always thought veterans only got to take their uniforms out of mothballs for parades.  Apparently, Mr. Allen wears his to the supermarket.

With the 24/7 media attention that’s been devoted to the ecological disaster, it is easy to regard the leak as the worst thing that’s ever happened to the environment.  But even now it only ranks as about the 35^th worst oil spill in the past hundred years.  Something else that we should not lose sight of is that the Gulf is a magnet for hurricanes, just as California is one for earthquakes and New York City is one for Islamic terrorists.  That means that bad stuff is always going to be happening and if people are going to live in such places, they have to accept the risks.  British Petroleum will not always be around to pay for the cleanup.

            The leak has led to Obama’s declaring a 6-month moratorium on deep sea drilling, which should pretty much finish off the Gulf’s economy for the foreseeable future, unless Judge Feldman’s ruling stands.  On the other hand, our president did send $2 billion to Brazil to help finance deep-sea oil exploration by Petrobar, a company in which George Soros had recently invested.  And, yes, Brazil is the very same country that recently joined with Turkey in proclaiming its alignment with Iran’s Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

            A lot has been said and written about Obama’s handling of the crisis.  None of it has been good.  Even some of his erstwhile acolytes have taken him to task.  I can understand their disillusionment.  The man did announce, after all, that with his election, the earth would be healed and the oceans would recede, and nary a word about oil pollution.  The magnitude of the leak has certainly confirmed that BP knew what it was doing when it sank a well there.  Unfortunately, the leak also emphasizes how stubborn and short-sighted Congress has been in its refusal to drill in Alaska or anywhere else that is currently inhabited by caribou, jackrabbits, elk, snakes or snails.

            The fact is, Obama has brought it all on himself.  When he was courting us, he spoke of transparency and of uniting the right and the left; he rhapsodized about a post-racial America and an America that would be respected around the world.  Well, I guess we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves if we bought the lies.  Even someone as bright and successful as Sandra Bullock fell for Jesse James’ line of bull hockey.

            I almost feel sorry for the president.  I mean, it must seem as if God, Himself, is pulling the rug out from under him.  After all, it was only five years ago that all the left-wing creeps, including Obama, were mugging George Bush over his handling of a natural disaster and, suddenly, we have Obama tripping over his own feet in the same general area.

            Understand, I don’t blame him for ignoring the disaster in the early days.  After all, the media had given him a pass for ignoring the recent flooding of Nashville.  They had ignored it, too.  But once the oil leak became bigger news than North Korea’s sinking of a South Korean ship, bigger news than the unholy Muslim flotilla and even bigger news than the arrest of Joran van der Sloot, I would have assumed that Obama would have done all in his power to give the illusion of competence and concern.  Instead, he golfed and partied while Governor Jindal’s request for material and equipment were ignored.  We had the Coast Guard ordering skimmer ships shut down because they didn’t have a prescribed number of life jackets on board.  We had offers of assistance from Norway, Holland and 11 other nations, being refused because of something called the Jones Act, for no other reason than that Obama didn’t want to upset the maritime unions and their insistence that only ships flying the U.S. flag — and employing U.S. union crews! — be allowed to function in U.S. waters.

            The way I see it, British Petroleum was the perfect boogeyman for liberals.  After all, their executives owned yachts and either spoke with snooty English accents or referred to “small people.”  Red meat, indeed, for congressional committees chaired by the self-righteous likes of Henry (“I voted to continue funding ACORN because they do a lot of good work”) Waxman.

            The bonus is that BP has very deep pockets, so that Obama can grandstand and demand that the company pay everyone on the Gulf more money than they would have ever made renting motel rooms and fishing.

            After insisting that there will be a six-month moratorium on off-shore drilling, which would do far more long term damage than the oil leak, Obama then tried to turn the screws on BP, by insisting they pay all of the laid-off oil crews, not just those working for British Petroleum, for income he, himself, was causing them to lose.  Even BP finally had enough, and said they would pay their own workers, but not Exxon’s or Shell’s.

            If Obama had gotten away with it, I’m sure he planned to solve America’s unemployment ills by forcing BP to put the other 20 million out-of-work Americans on the company payroll.

            I submit that there is one consolation for Barack Obama.  If much more crud is released into the Gulf of Mexico, this two-bit messiah might actually be able to walk on  water.

Until recently, I had been totally unaware of Mohamed (Mo) Ibrahim’s existence, and had never heard that, through his foundation, he funds the world’s single largest cash award.

            The Prize for Achievement in African Leadership bestows $500,000-a-year for the first 10 years and $200,000-a-year for life thereafter to the African leader or former leader who delivers security, health, education and economic development to his constituents, and who democratically transfers power to his successor.

            Mo Ibrahim, who is a Sudanese-born English mobile communications entrepreneur, is a billionaire, and can probably come up with the annual prize money by looking under the cushions on his couch.  However, in the years since he established the Prize in 2006, it has only been handed out twice.  Once it went to Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique, and once it went to Festus Mogae of Botswana.  But in spite of the fact that there are 34 nations in sub-Sahara Africa, not to mention all those Arab and Muslim countries above the great desert, two years have gone by without a new honoree.

            That would indicate a couple of things to me.  First off, for all the lip service, not to mention foreign aid, paid out by the western nations to Africa, it’s all been for naught.  The dark continent is pretty much one enormous cesspool of murder, tribalism and corruption.

            What’s more, Africa’s thugs control 53 votes in the United Nations, which dwarfs the number of votes the western democracies possess.  So much for the “international community,” which left-wing lunatics are always claiming is, rightfully, the world’s moral arbiter.

            Another thing I’m able to glean from the fact that not a single African leader has shown himself to be worthy of the Prize in the past two years is that even with all those millions of dollars being dangled before them, it’s chump change compared to the amount they can steal running the show in Yemen, the Sudan, Kenya, and all the other ganglands.

            Something else that occurred to me is that if there was a comparable prize for American leaders, it, too, would go begging.

I have heard there are native tribes who refuse to be photographed because they fear the camera will snatch away their souls.  I used to wonder where they got that quirky idea, but that was a long time ago.

Since then, I have heard Carrie Fisher say, “Obama is brilliant.  The thing is, he’s half-white, but that’s not enough for the Tea Bag crowd.  For them, it’s all white or (expletive deleted)-off!”

 Sean Penn hopes his right-wing critics “die screaming of rectal cancer.”

Julia Roberts pointed out that “Republican” in the dictionary comes just after “reptile” and just before “repugnant.”

            Susan Sarandon observed that “Sarah Palin’s views are so limiting, they set the women’s movement back years.  When you get a woman in government, you want the right woman.  You don’t want just any vagina.”

            Michael Moore said: “I would like to apologize for referring to George W. Bush as a ‘deserter.’  What I meant to say is that he is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar, and a functional illiterate.  And he poops his pants.”

            Janeane Garofalo declared that the world was better off when the Soviet Union was a superpower, and, never satisfied to leave bad enough alone, went on to say, “The reason a person is a conservative Republican is because something is wrong with them.  That’s science — that’s neuroscience!”  About the folks in the Tea Party, she insisted, “It is all about having a black man in the White House.  This is racism straight up and they’re nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks.”

            Joy Behar not only defended creepy Joe McGinniss’s decision to purchase a house next door to the Palins, but seconded his comments comparing Palin’s criticism to the behavior of Nazi storm troopers.  It reminded me of California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown’s comparing his opponent, Meg Whitman, to Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.  Is it just my imagination or do some people never give a second thought to Nazis or Islamic terrorists except when they’re looking to compare Republicans to something bad?

            Danny Glover, who despises America and adores communism, blames global warming for the earthquake in Haiti.  Together with Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Sean Penn, Glover is a charter member of the Fidel Castro/Hugo Chavez Fan Club.  Odd, isn’t it, how these people subscribe to all things socialistic except when it comes to their paychecks?

            According to George Clooney, “It started with the witch hunts in Salem.  The conservatives’ point of view was ‘Burn them at the stake,’ and the liberals’ point of view was ‘There are no witches.’  And that’s how it continued with the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage.  The liberals were always right in the end.”

            Harry Belafonte slandered Condi Rice and Colin Powell, calling them house slaves.  He told Hugo Chavez that he and millions of his fellow Americans supported his Chilean revolution.  Then, for good measure, Belafonte called George W. Bush a terrorist, saying he was far worse than the jihadists responsible for 9/11, and labeled the Dept. of Homeland Security America’s Gestapo.

            Rosie O’Donnell stuck up for Helen Thomas after the 89-year-old gargoyle told the Israelis to “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Poland and Germany.

            It took me a good long time to realize that the tribesmen were correct in thinking the camera had a magical way of stealing people’s souls, but, so far as I know, they remain unaware that it can also make off with their brains. 

A lot of people were left shaking their heads after Alvin Greene, who hadn’t done any campaigning or spent a single dollar on advertising, won the Democratic primary in South Carolina. It made perfect sense to me that a 32-year-old guy that nobody had ever heard of, who was facing a felony charge and who, for good measure, had lived with his father ever since the U.S. Army had invited him to leave the service, would win his party’s congressional primary. After all, he had a (D) after his name and, what’s more, his name came first on the ballot. What better reasons would an ignorant and lazy electorate need to have before casting their votes?

Apparently Nancy Pelosi was grief-stricken when David Obey of Wisconsin, a senior member of Congress and the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, decided not to run for re-election this year. In announcing he was bowing out after more than 40 years in office, he said that his proudest achievement was presiding over the House during the March vote for ObamaCare. Can you imagine such a thing? That is one of the saddest things I ever heard. Imagine spending four decades in power and the thing you’re proudest of is helping to pass a bill that is reviled by most Americans, a bill that was so bad that even with huge Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, Pelosi and Reid had to resort to bribes and intimidation to get it passed. But, then, I expect that on his deathbed, Benedict Arnold probably said that betraying America was his own proudest moment.

Recently, I found myself wondering why it is that liberals and conservatives have such opposing points of view when it comes to both foreign and domestic policy. I decided it had a great deal to do with one’s perception of human nature. For instance, practicing Christians, who, in the main, tend to be conservatives, believe there has been only one perfect being. Liberals, on the other hand, are convinced that human beings would be perfect if only capitalism was destroyed and they could run things as they wish.

Liberals actually believe that under socialism, everyone would share equally because everyone would work equally. I would think that anyone over the age of six would recognize the fallacy of that foolish notion. There are and there will always be a large number of people who are along for the ride. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not necessarily a villain, but he is hopelessly naïve. I also suspect that most of them are subscribing to notions they don’t believe for a minute.

For instance, consider how many liberals who insist that dependence on fossil fuels is a crime against the earth ride around in limos, SUVs and private jets. Consider that people like Al Gore, Arianna Huffington and Oprah Winfrey, reside in homes that are five or ten times larger than one would deem necessary, considering their alleged convictions and the size of their families.

Speaking of families, don’t liberals have them? Haven’t they taken note of the fact that members of a single family are often at odds? I, myself, know people who haven’t spoken to their own siblings in decades. So, how is it exactly that millions and millions of perfect strangers are expected to work, live and share, in perfect harmony?

Heck, liberals don’t even want to deal with conservatives, let alone share the fruits of their labor. Which is why in Washington, left-wingers never compromise with the opposition, choosing to denigrate them as nay-sayers if they balk at rubber-stamping Obama’s radical agenda; and why in Hollywood, conservatives are forced to conceal their political beliefs, lest they be blacklisted by the very folks who are still whining about a blacklist that ended over half a century ago.

In the 1960s, a Democratic president said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Today, we have a Democratic president who appears to have dedicated his administration to seeing what he can do to our country.

I figure if 62 million people could vote for that guy, it’s really no wonder that Alvin Greene won his election.

It’s no wonder that Rahm Emanuel, who could play the villain in a James Bond movie, looks a little bit like the Wicked Witch of the West, and who famously said that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, has found a home in Obama’s White House.  When the president suggested that the oil leak could lead to his raising taxes at the gas pump, I could easily imagine Mr. Emanuel standing off-camera chuckling like a crone and rubbing his hands together.

            One thing you have to say for Obama is that he thinks big.  Not satisfied with merely destroying our economy and jeopardizing the well being of older Americans, he did the same to England and its seniors when he began threatening British Petroleum with criminal charges.  The value of BP stock, which had already been teetering because of the tragic events in the Gulf, plummeted, and with it, the dividend checks of English pensioners.  I could almost hear Emanuel’s chortling, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!”

            If he could, I am convinced that Barack Obama would tax the air we breathe.  In fact, with Cap & Trade, I think he can.  After all, in cahoots with Pelosi and Reid, he has already found any number of ways to tax our patience.

            Although I still entertain the hope that Harry Reid will be sent off into the Nevada sunset in November, I know that Nancy Pelosi will be re-elected.  But however I feel about her, it really is a wonder that San Francisco, the only freak show in America with its own city charter, has a congressional representative who so closely resembles a normal human being.  Still, every time I look at her awe-struck face and hear that spooky little girl voice, I recall a storyline from the “Li’l Abner” comic strip.  The long-time senator from Dogpatch, Jack S. Phogbound, was facing certain defeat in an upcoming election until he gave one final campaign speech.  He told the voters that if he lost, he would be moving back home, whereas if they re-elected him, they wouldn’t see hide or hair of him for another six years.  He won in a landslide.

            I’d like to think that helps explain why people like Charles Rangel, Henry Waxman and Robert Byrd, haven’t had to do an honest day’s work in their entire lives.

            The two main reasons I want to see the GOP take back the House in November is that I want the brakes applied to Obama’s radical transformation of America, and I want to see Pelosi, as the ex-Speaker of the House, have to hand over the keys to that colossal jet that she’s been using as her personal cross-country shuttle, all the while prattling on about America’s dependence on fossil fuels.

            What she refuses to acknowledge is that fossil fuels literally fuel our industrialized nation, whereas the jumbo jet merely fuels Pelosi’s jumbo-sized ego.

One of the great mysteries of life is how Democrats have managed to tar Republicans as America’s racists.  I mean, unless I’m entirely mistaken about their party affiliation, FDR’s favorite Supreme Court liberal, Hugo Black, and that grand old man of the U.S. Senate, Democrat Robert Byrd, were proud members of the Ku Klux Klan.

            George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond and even Theophilus “Bull” Connor, all came to political prominence with a (D) after their name.  What’s more, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The bill, by the way, had spent months bottled up in the Rules Committee, thanks to its chairman, Rep. Howard W. Smith (D).  The fact of the matter is that the Democrats spent 83 days filibustering against its passage until Republican Senator Everett Dirksen used his power and prestige to get it enacted.

            On the other hand, it is worth noting that the first three black men elected to the United States Senate, Hiram Revels; Blanche Bruce, who was the son of a slave; and Edward Brooke, were all Republicans.

            Therefore, one has to assume that the reason that over 90% of black Americans troop out to vote for any left-wing bozo, be he black or white, is that down deep they agree with patronizing liberals who regard them all as ignorant and shiftless.  Otherwise, why would they parrot left-wing talking points about conservatives?  Why would they continue to invite liberal politicians into their churches to use their pulpits for campaign purposes?  And why wouldn’t they question the morality of liberals who not only conveniently ignore “separation of church and state” on such occasions, but on all other occasions, are leading the attack on Christian leaders, symbols and traditions?

            They would also have to ask themselves why it is that they get to blame their crime stats and mind-boggling rate of high school drop-outs and illegitimate births, on white racism, whereas Asians somehow out-do whites on average when it comes to education and earning power.  If America is such a racist nation, wouldn’t it figure that whites would subjugate Asians?  After all, not only are they easily recognizable, but over the past 70 years, we have waged war against Japan, North Korea and North Vietnam.

            So, just exactly how is it that all those people who come here from Cambodia, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Laos and the Philippines, seem to flourish, while people who were born here, speak the language and have been the recipients of billions of dollars worth of government programs, including Operation Head Start, small business loans and affirmative action, continue to whine about racism and continue to support white liberals and the various crooks, creeps and communists, collectively known as the Congressional Black Caucus?

            If white Americans are racists, we’re certainly the most selective ones the world has ever known, inasmuch as our bigotry seems to be reserved solely for illegal aliens and black ingrates.

I love America, but honesty compels me to admit I used to love it even more.

I loved it more when people could admit they were patriots without being called xenophobes.  I loved it more when a person could say that nobody should be allowed to sneak into the country without being labeled a racist.  I loved it more when one could point out that if people aren’t allowed to profit from a crime, why are the parents of so-called anchor babies the exception? 

            I loved America more when a person could say that he thought a culture that had given the world Shakespeare, Rembrandt, DaVinci, Dickens, Bach, Beethoven, the telephone, the electric light, the automobile, the jet plane, rockets to the moon, cell phones, radar and a cure for polio, was superior to one that gave the world Sharia law, suicide bombers and clitorectomies, without being called a jingoist.

            I loved America more when people didn’t worry so much about infringing on the rights of convicted pedophiles, and someone besides me wondered why the average prison sentence doled out to a child molester was a scant three years.

            I loved America more when people listened to music filled with melody, harmony and decipherable lyrics, and went to movies about recognizable human beings coping with recognizable human problems.

            I loved America more when if the phone rang, it was very likely someone you wanted to speak to, and not some shill calling on behalf of some hack politician trolling for money.

            I loved America more before baseball players used steroids, and before millions of fans cheered them on as they cheated their way into the record books, erasing the achievements of people like Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Roger Maris.

            I loved America more before parents thought winning was so important they’d hold their kids back from entering school so they could be bigger and faster than their classmates and wind up being high school football stars.

            I loved America more before other parents considered honest competition so destructive, they decided scores shouldn’t be kept at their kids’ sporting events, and that pass/fail should replace grades in the classroom.

            I loved America more when youngsters had to earn respect, and high self-esteem wasn’t considered a birthright.

            I loved America more before Barack Obama told us a pack of lies in order to get elected, and when the lies were eventually exposed, many millions of Americans really didn’t care.

            I loved America more when vulgarians, bullies and half-wits, were people to be avoided, and not admired, mimicked, and rewarded with their own TV shows and fan clubs.

            I loved America more when people came here to fit in, learn the language and change their national loyalty, not merely their address.

            I loved America more when Supreme Court justices were expected to be experts when it came to the U.S. Constitution, not a bunch of bleeding hearts who could moonlight as social workers or, God forbid, community organizers.

            I used to love America more when we all admired people who shouted “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” to King George and “Nuts!” to the Nazis, and not someone who bows, scrapes and apologizes to our enemies.

            Finally, I loved America more when America seemed to love itself more.

Clearly, the only people who actually believe that the flotilla that attempted to break the Israeli blockade was on a humanitarian mission are so dumb they’re living proof that a person doesn’t have to be in a coma to be brain-dead.

            Ever since the Israelis were naïve enough to hand Gaza over to its sworn enemies, Hamas has shown its appreciation by showering them with thousands of missiles.  I keep wondering how many more times Israel will cede land for peace before they finally figure things out.  Lucy couldn’t pull the football trick on Charlie Brown half as many times as the Arabs have conned Israel into believing that their actual demands can be met with mere acreage.

            One of the big lies concocted over the past half century by those on the Left is the one in which they deny that they’re anti-Semites, that it’s not Jews they despise but merely the policies of the Israeli government.  Inasmuch as those policies consist of not allowing their Arab and Muslim enemies to slaughter them, it’s a denial that’s awfully hard to swallow.  How is it, you have to ask, that demonstrations against the national policies of China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Cuba, never seem to take place in our streets or on our college campuses?

            Anyone who’s the least bit objective recognizes that Israel has to do everything in its power to prevent Iran from smuggling bigger and better missiles to Hamas.  And for its efforts, Israel finds itself being condemned by the U.N.  As bad and as ineffective as the League of Nations was, at least it gave its dais and its applause to Haile Sellassie and not to Mussolini.  The U.N., which has already greeted Hugo Chavez and Mahmud Ahmadinejad like rock stars, just as it used to do for Yasser Arafat, is a cancer in the midst of New York City.  It’s high time we booted it out of America, thus saving ourselves a lot of money and a lot of unnecessary annoyance.  This is a group, let us keep in mind, that did nothing about the genocide in Rwanda, and ignored North Korea’s sinking of the South Korean naval vessel and the murder of its 46 sailors.  But they couldn’t wait to defend a bunch of Hamas supporters who were, typical of humanitarians on the Left, armed with knives, iron clubs and Islamic curses.

            It’s not too surprising that Obama’s old chums, William Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, along with Jodie Evans, who founded Code Pink, helped plan the flotilla.  Based on recent history, I fully expect that the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize will go to Mr. Ayers.

            Speaking of North Korea, when the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded and sank under mysterious circumstances, a rumor went around that a North Korean submarine had torpedoed it.  That sounded far-fetched, but so did the earlier sinking of the South Korean ship.  When I later discovered that the oil rig had been built by a major South Korean company, it didn’t sound unreasonable that Kim Jong-il would take the opportunity to strike South Korea and the U.S. a devastating blow for the price of a single piece of ordnance.

            It’s odd the way that Obama keeps telling us that the buck stops with him, and then immediately follows that up by blaming Bush and the Republicans for everything from the oil leak to his nicotine habit.  But one can’t help noticing that Obama much prefers talking tough to British Petroleum than to an actual enemy of this country, even though BP donated $71,000 to his 2008 campaign.  I guess those are the only bucks that actually stop with him.

            When he’s not kicking BP around, Obama is busy attacking Arizona.  You would think, judging by his passion, that Arizona had done something really dreadful, like sinking a shipload of sailors or attempting to build a nuclear bomb with the stated purpose of annihilating a neighboring state.  But those aren’t the kinds of things that tick off this president.  However, let a state decide to take a federal law seriously and try to enforce it, and watch him blow his stack.

            Some people have been shaking their heads over the incompetence Obama and his cronies displayed in trying to get Andrew Romanoff and Joe Sestak to bow out of their Senate primaries.  But I blame the media.  By this time, Obama had come to believe that he could get away with just about anything, and the media would cover his back.  After all, when Harry Reid said that bribing senators to vote for the administration’s health bill was just “business as usual” and Pelosi said there would be plenty of time to read the bill after it had been voted on, the ladies and gentlemen of the press had winked, chuckled and exchanged high-fives.

            My witty friend, Merrill Heatter, suggested that for the scuzzy role that Bill Clinton had played in the Sestak affair, he should be impeached and no longer get to be an ex-president.

            While I find it impossible to be bi-partisan when it comes to major issues, it’s a whole different story when it comes to political sleaze.  There’s plenty to go around.  Consider Mark Kirk ®, Richard Blumenthal (D) and Jan Brewer ®.  Both Kirk and Blumenthal lied about their military service.  In the case of Gov. Brewer, she had boasted that her father was killed fighting the Nazis.  But in fact he worked as a civilian supervisor at a naval munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nevada, during World War II, and died 10 years after the war ended.

            The governor, once her lie was discovered, explained that she meant that he had become ill while working around harmful chemicals at the depot, and that it eventually did him in.

            I see.  And if someone had died in a car crash while driving to the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California, in 1944, I suppose his survivors could claim that he’d died in battle…battling traffic.

            Isn’t it amazing that all these people who want us to trust them with our futures and the futures of our children and grandchildren can’t even be trusted to tell a simple truth about themselves?  And what will it take before these louts figure out that their lies are going to be found out and made public by their political foes?  Is it because they are constantly sheltered by their cronies and their boot-licking aides that they appear to be so oblivious to the hostile world outside their little cocoons?

            Well, just in case I ever decide to run for public office, there are probably a few statements I’ve made along the way that you may have somehow misconstrued.  To begin with, when I said that I had won an Academy Award, I meant to say that I had won an Academy Award bet when I wagered that “Hurt Locker” would beat out “Avatar” for the Oscar.  And when I said I was in the Baseball Hall of Fame, I meant that I had once visited the museum in Cooperstown.  And finally, when I said that I had served in the military and been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for my heroic efforts in Vietnam, when I single-handedly wiped out 148 enemy soldiers and rescued twice that many of my fellow soldiers by carrying them piggy-back through a mine field, I misspoke.  I only meant that I had seen a lot of war movies when I was growing up.

My wife told me she saw a TV show about a fellow who had survived being trapped in his car during a snowstorm for 14 days.  That, alone, seemed amazing, but the part I couldn’t believe was the survivor’s claim that he had forced himself to stay awake all that time, lest he fall asleep and never wake up.

            The truth, of course, is that I have no idea how long a person can keep going without sleep.  The longest I ever managed was three days when I crossed the country on a train years ago and discovered, to my considerable annoyance, that I was unable to sleep sitting up.  But even I, I’m certain, would have managed to doze off long before two weeks had elapsed if I had been taking a choo-choo to, say, Tokyo.

            Thinking about the guy in the snow got me to wondering how long a normal person could survive without food and water, and how long Obama could go without giving a speech.

            But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that the world can’t go even three days without a scapegoat.  It is therefore perfectly understandable that Obama can barely begin a sentence without blaming something or other on his predecessor.

            For most of the people of the world, Israel serves the same function as George Bush.  Unfortunately for the world, that requires them to align themselves with Arabs and Islamists who are not, under normal circumstances, the most endearing of people, given, as they are, to religious intolerance, brutality towards their own women, a general antipathy to education and free speech, and an affinity for blowing up anyone who takes exception to the Quran, draws a picture of Mohammad or questions the historical accuracy of the Protocols of Zion.

            Recently, a half-dozen boats left Turkey bound for Gaza.  Turkey, by the way, is an Islamic nation, which has over the past half dozen years reneged on its claim to being either secular or civilized.  The lie about the flotilla, widely promulgated by a corrupt world-wide media, was that these boats were filled with humanitarians accompanying food and medicine to the suffering souls being oppressed by the Israelis.  The fact of the matter was that Israel had long established a policy of trucking in such supplies once they had made certain that the Syrians, the Iranis and the Turks, weren’t smuggling in replacements for the thousands of missiles Hamas had showered upon them.

            Well, for openers, the “humanitarians” were affiliated with Hamas and other terrorist groups, and they were armed with knives, chains and iron pipes.  Anyone who insists these were the good guys is the sort of creep who would cheer for the lions against the Christians.

            In the wake of all this, Helen Thomas, the grand old doyen of the Washington press corps, whose own parents were immigrants from Lebanon, suggested that all the Israelis should go back where they came from.  When pressed as to where that would be, she laughingly replied, “Poland or Germany.”

            It so happens that by now a very large percentage of Israelis were born in Israel.  Most of their parents and grandparents didn’t migrate from Germany or Poland after World War II because the majority of those people had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps.  Many others came to Israel from the Soviet Union, Hungary, Ethiopia and the United States.  Even more came from the Middle East nations that had exiled them and confiscated their homes and businesses in the wake of Israel’s successfully defending itself in 1948 against the Arab legions representing Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

            Also, in case it escaped Ms. Thomas’s attention, after the end of World War II, a number of surviving Polish Jews tried returning to their homeland.  Well over a thousand of them were killed by Poles, who were not only a notoriously anti-Semitic people, but many of them had taken advantage of the War to confiscate Jewish property and feared they might have to give it back.

            As for post-war Germany, it was under the command of Gen. George Patton, who confided in his diary, as reported on by Allis and Ronald Radosh in their book, “A Safe Haven,” that Jews “are lower than animals.”

            Frankly, considering what a left-wing propagandist Helen Thomas has been during her entire career, I am delighted to see her damn herself to the same sort of media purgatory reserved for people like Walter Duranty and Dan Rather, who confuse celebrity with omnipotence, and personal bias with objective reporting.

            Normally, after witnessing Ms. Thomas’s spectacular fall from grace, I would say that Christmas came early this year, but I know that would be premature on my part.  Oh, Christmas will definitely come earlier than usual in 2010, but it won’t arrive until November 2^nd, otherwise known as Election Day.

I noticed recently that Barack Obama was holding out an olive branch to the Taliban.  He claimed to recognize that some of them were not as radical as others.  I find it odd, though, that he can somehow spot nuances in terrorists 7,000 miles away, but every member of the Tea Party looks like a thug and a racist to him.

            If and when British Petroleum seals the oil leak at the bottom of the ocean, I hope they turn their attention to the current administration, which is leaking money at a record pace.  What’s more, I am in favor of their using mud, rubber tires or tar and feathers, just so long as it stops Obama, Pelosi and Reid, before they squander more.

            If you have ever wondered if the MSM is really as biased as people like Bernard Goldberg and I claim, you merely have to compare the way they covered the flooding of New Orleans in 2005 and the way they, not to mention Obama, ignored the flooding of Nashville this year.  Aside from the fact that the earlier disaster affected a city with a population that was 61% black and the Nashville flood affected a city in which only a quarter of the population was black, one would be hard-pressed to explain why the one in Louisiana was treated as if it were a tragedy of biblical proportions, while the deluge in Tennessee’s capital received the equivalent of a TV weatherman’s remarking that humidity had reached 100% in Nashville.

            The first time I heard that a huge mosque was going to be erected on the site of Ground Zero, I remember waiting for the punch line.  The next few times I heard the news, I assumed I was having a nightmare and would soon be awake.  Now I can only shake my head at the insanity.  What’s next?  A statue of Osama bin Laden on Capitol Hill?  As I understand it, it’s supposed to be a tribute of some sort to decent Muslims.  My question is, how many times are we going to honor Islam?  I would have thought that electing a guy named Barack Hussein Obama a scant seven years after the barbarians murdered 3,000 Americans was more than enough.

            Speaking of the president, I recently saw a bumper-sticker that read: What do Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden have in common?  They both have friends who bombed the Pentagon.

            But I suppose 2010 is no time to be asking for a reality check.  After all, three of the people who were most directly responsible for the economic meltdown — Obama, Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank — are the same three mugs who insist they’re going to safeguard the American economy by making sure there are no restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!

            Inasmuch as I reside in a state that keeps electing people like Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Henry Waxman, Maxine Waters and Brad Sherman, I realize I am not in the best position to throw stones, but will somebody please explain how it is that Barney Frank, who looks and sounds exactly like Elmer Fudd, keeps getting re-elected by the folks in Massachusetts.  Where’s Bugs Bunny when you really need him?

            Finally, proving that stupidity is no impediment to making a billion dollars, Ted Turner recently surmised that the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could very well mean that God doesn’t want us to drill offshore.  He added that the recent mine disaster strongly suggested that the Lord is also tired of our digging for coal.  The interviewer, CNN’s Poppy Harlow, who is perhaps harboring the dream of some day being Mrs. Poppy Turner, didn’t bother asking the amateur theologian if the deaths and destruction caused by hurricanes and cyclones indicate that God also doesn’t want us to employ wind power, and if skin cancer tells us all we need to know about how He feels about solar energy.

            If only 80-proof bourbon could be used as a substitute for oil, we’d only have to hook up some wires to Mr. Turner and we’d soon be free of our dependence on the black gooey stuff.

            I must confess that every time I hear Turner bloviate, I’m grateful that he and Hanoi Jane didn’t have any children.  One can only imagine that the attending physician in the delivery room would have been Dr. Frankenstein.