At the strike meeting, someone had suggested that because a number of us would be gainfully employed for the duration of the work stoppage, we should have to kick in an additional 3% to the strike fund.  That seemed fair to me, so I raised my hand along with just about everyone else.

Then another writer suggested that because the networks would be using re-runs in order to keep product on the air, the same 3% levy should be placed on residual payments.  That seemed an equally fair notion.  This time, however, when I raised my hand, I found I was one of very few.

That was my initial wake-up call.  The second occurred during a strike meeting in the 80s, when our negotiating committee reported that we had come to terms on DVDs.  We were agreeing to accept 1.2% of producer’s gross.  Oh, and by the way, it would pertain only to movies produced after 1971.

When I saw Julius Epstein trudging up the aisle, it dawned on me that the Guild had just screwed him out of “Casablanca,” not to mention dozens of other Warner Brothers classics of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, that he’d co-scripted with his late brother, Phil.

Why, I wondered, hadn’t the Guild settled for, say, just 1% of producers gross, but insisted that the deal cover every movie going back to “The Great Train Robbery”?

The answer, of course, was that once again the members of the Guild had decided to cannibalize its own.  After all, most of the members wrote TV, not movies.  And even among those who wrote screenplays, most of them hadn’t even been in the Guild prior to 1971.

The next time the Guild showed its true colors, which mainly consist of various shades of yellow, I was a member of the Board of Directors.  I was in the final few months of my second two-year term when a couple of lawyers showed up at a Board meeting.  They were seeking a donation for legal expenses, along with a request that we lend our moral support by signing an amicus curiae brief.

The case involved an art gallery exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s pornographic efforts.  Mapplethorpe, in case his name doesn’t register, was a photographer whose artistic vision required full-frontal nudity of pre-pubescent children.

When the director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center displayed the traveling exhibit, Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment,” the city shut it down.   (Predictably, the exhibit was funded with American tax dollars, courtesy of the National Endowment of the Arts.)  That, in turn, led to the lawyers coming west, hat in hand.

Because the Board of Directors was authorized to spend up to $5,000 of Guild funds without requiring a vote of the membership, we were often approached by lawyers involved in censorship cases.  Needless to say, they usually got it.  Just like the politicians in Washington, we found it not only easy, but morally uplifting, to spend other people’s money.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R, S.C.) had already gone on record to state that he found Mapplethorpe’s work reprehensible, and urging that no additional tax dollars be allocated to the NEA.

Although, over the previous few years, I had gotten along well with most of my fellow Board members, who included David Rintels, Carl Gottlieb, Hal Kantor, George Kirgo, Ollie Crawford and Jean Butler, I was aware that I was definitely in the minority when I rose to voice my objections.

I argued that, one, Mapplethorpe was a pornographer; two that in a country with well over 250 million people, no “artist” should have to be supported with tax dollars.  If people didn’t wish to buy what you were selling, it wasn’t a subsidy you needed, it was vocational guidance.  And, three, that we had a fiduciary responsibility not to squander the money of our fellow WGA members in such a morally questionable manner, and that, furthermore, community standards trumped what a bunch of Hollywood writers 2,000 miles away thought.

I was prepared to be out-voted.  After all, a fair number of my fellow Board members had been blacklisted in the 50s and still believed that this gave them a moral authority denied to mere mortals.  But I guess I wasn’t prepared to be out-voted 18-1.  I also wasn’t prepared for the way they reacted.  Initially, it was shock and dismay that someone in their midst was agreeing with a reactionary Southern senator, but it soon became clear that they refused to even pay attention to what I was saying.  They had that quickly decided that if Sen, Helms was on one side of the issue, they had no option but to be on the other side.  At one point, during my brief remarks, I recall feeling like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” wondering if I should drop a heavy book on the floor to get their attention, just to make sure they still had faces.

In the intervening years, I have taken very little part in Guild activities.  But that doesn’t mean that the Guild hasn’t continued to annoy me.

For one thing, there are the constant homages offered up to the victims of the Hollywood blacklist.  What’s fascinating about the adoration of the handful of writers who were sent underground for a few years 60 years ago is that if those who were despised as squealers, condemned for naming names, people like Elia Kazan, Larry Parks, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Taylor and Budd Schulberg, had been ratting out fascists instead of communists, Hollywood’s liberals would have hailed them as patriots and erected statues in their honor at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

What’s ironic and pathetic is that the very same people who utter the names of Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, John Howard Lawson and the rest of the Hollywood 10 with the same reverence that some people extend to Jesus and his disciples, not only choose to ignore the blacklisting of older scriptwriters and directors, but make it a practice, as reported in Ben Shapiro’s “Primetime Propaganda,” to bad-mouth their conservative colleagues every chance they get.

It is no accident, after all, that the WGA’s slick monthly, Written By, has never published an article about the decade-long ageism class action lawsuit that culminated earlier this year in a $70 million settlement by studios, networks and agencies, just as there will never be an article about the widespread practice of blacklisting those on the Right.

The dirty little secret of the Writers Guild is that those who are most responsible for blacklisting over the past six decades are its very own writer-producer members.

Recently, I sent an email to Richard Stayton, editor of Written By, to point out that in a recent issue of the monthly there had been 26 photos of members, and not one of them was over the age of 50.  When taken together with the fact that nothing had ever been written about the ageism suit, I suggested that this displayed an obvious bias against older writers.

Inasmuch as writing scripts, unlike, say, playing centerfield for the Yankees, doesn’t require young eyes or young legs, it suggested that even after the lawsuit, nothing had changed in terms of employment or perception of veteran writers.  I felt that the magazine should devote at least some of its attention to a problem that affects a large number of its current members and will, God willing, eventually plague them all.

It seemed a better use of the magazine than devoting yet another article to some thirty-year-old who insisted, with a straight face, that it was his passion that led him to write “Nightmare on Elm Street: The Blight That Wouldn’t Die, Part XXIV,” and not his mortgage.

Within the hour, Stayton informed me that my letter would not run.

Frankly, I wasn’t too surprised to find that if you’re 71, you can’t even get a letter published by the WGA.

As Shapiro points out, TV has grown increasingly liberal over the past 50 years.  Although he is only 27 years old, he has been diligent in his historical research.  Moreover, because he is young, Jewish and wore his Harvard Law baseball cap when he interviewed the writers, producers and network executives, who have created the product and scheduled the programming over the years, they all assumed he was, like them, a devout leftist.

I suspect that even without the baseball cap, these limousine liberals would have probably assumed that, like everyone else who enters their well-insulated bubble, Shapiro idolized Barack Obama.  Why else would they not have bothered checking out his credentials?  After all, in spite of being a practicing attorney, Shapiro has written three previous books, all espousing his conservative values, and is a contributor to several right-wing blogs.

Even I, who personally know several of the makers and shakers in the industry, was shocked to read some of the things they had to say about conservatives.  You would have thought they were discussing jihadists, except they are generally far more respectful when referring to the people who wish to behead us.  It’s only when it comes to writers and actors with whom they have political differences, that they’re united in their desire to see them blacklisted or, better yet, dead.

The irony of course is that these are the same self-righteous characters who have carried on incessantly about the inequity of the industry’s having blacklisted Communists 60 years ago.  Hypocrisy aside, there is a world of difference that is apparent to most normal, fair-minded people, between a conservative opposing ObamaCare and a Communist tithing 10% of his MGM salary to the Soviet Union, where Joseph Stalin was starving millions of Russians to death and assassinating his political rivals.  Even the fact that Stalin had his boot on the neck of hundreds of millions of people who had the misfortune of living in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, was of no concern to the Hollywood lefties.  It should be noted that these were the same folks who made Siberia, the hellish place to which Stalin exiled Jews and other nuisances, the tagline to a thousand benign jokes in a way they’d have never dared with Auschwitz or Buchenwald. 

I was indeed fortunate that, thanks to having been born into a Russian-Jewish home, I was raised to believe the sun rose and set on FDR.  Once something is virtually ingrained in your DNA, it’s hard to break free.  In my case, it was the combination and contrast of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan that ultimately did the trick.  But in terms of my career, it’s lucky that I didn’t come to my senses any sooner than I did.

Even though the TV movies I wrote weren’t political, it probably wouldn’t have saved me from being ostracized.  After reading “Primetime Propaganda” and discovering how very much Gene Reynolds, Allan Burns, Leonard Stern, Grant Tinker, Gary David Goldberg, James Brooks and Larry Gelbart, despised conservatives, I have to assume that I would never have had the opportunity to write episodes of  “McMillan & Wife,” “MASH,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Family Ties,” “Rhoda,” “The Governor & J.J.” or “Bob Newhart.”

Oddly enough, I broke in during the late 60s, writing a bunch of “Dragnet” scripts for Jack Webb.  The fact is I didn’t have to conceal my true feelings in order to write for the show that Shapiro ranks as the fifth most conservative series of all time.  Even back then, I was pro-cops and pro-military.  Somehow, in spite of my upbringing, I managed to be a registered Democrat without being a complete bonehead. 

I now recall that a few minutes after my first “Dragnet” episode aired, an acquaintance, writer Harlan Ellison, phoned me.  In lieu of “Hello,” he snarled, “I never knew you were a fascist!”  Then, in typical left-wing fashion, he hung up.  It’s very possible that was when my politics began evolving.  It is, after all, a prime example of the sort of fair and open-minded discourse I’ve come to expect from liberals.

Although Shapiro quotes me a few times (pages 69, 77 and 244, for those discerning readers too cheap to spring for the book), he left out — perhaps because I forgot to mention it — the one time I encountered political blowback during my TV writing career.

In 1990, I foolishly turned 50.  I say “foolishly” because if there’s one thing TV hates more than conservative writers, it’s aging ones.  Liberals oppose bigotry and discrimination unless, of course, they’re the ones doing the discriminating.

My mood over the next several years ranged from bleak to suicidal as unemployment led inevitably to the sale of our condo, the cashing in of my life insurance and, finally, to bankruptcy.  In 1999, though, through dumb luck and a series of quirky circumstances, I landed a spot on the writing staff of the Dick Van Dyke series, “Diagnosis Murder.”

The rest of the writing staff consisted of three male, left-wing, middle-aged yuppies.  The producer had hired them back in June.  By December, they decided they were working too hard and insisted that another writer be brought on board.  What they didn’t know was that they were inviting a viper into their midst.

When they discovered that I was not only a Republican, but that I despised Bill Clinton and had every intention of doing whatever I could to keep Al Gore from succeeding him, they made me feel about as welcome as heat rash.

To be fairer to them than they were to me, their attacks consisted mainly of witless jibes and juvenile ridicule, mainly questioning the intelligence of anyone who would even consider voting for a conservative.  For a while, it saddens me to admit, I took it because I really needed the paycheck.

Then one day, as if a huge light had been switched on, it occurred to me that they needed me.  I worked harder and longer hours and, what’s more, wrote better than they did.  That morning, taking the bit in my teeth, I interrupted their sophomoric prattle long enough to announce that the good times were over, and that they would have to either find a new target or grow up.

I explained as patiently as I could that I wasn’t opposed to bi-lingual education because I was a bigot, but because it holds Latino kids back academically and makes them hate school so much that they can’t wait to drop out.  Which, as we all know, they do in record numbers.

I told the three brats that if I was in favor of capital punishment, it wasn’t because I was bloodthirsty — or at least not just because I was bloodthirsty — but because, as a conservative, I naturally empathize with the victim, not the murderer.

Furthermore, I went on, throwing down the gauntlet, if any or all of them wished to debate any issue under the sun, I’d be more than happy to oblige.  Nobody accepted the challenge, but from that day on, the not-so-good-natured ribbing came to an end.

By the time the 2000 presidential election rolled around, we were all getting along just fine.  They even gave me a pass when Bush defeated Gore.  After all, by then they knew I was a lost cause.  Instead, like sharks smelling blood in the water, two of them turned on the third.  It seems the lunkhead made the fatal mistake of confessing that he’d voted for Ralph Nader.

I recall wondering at the time how he could have been so dumb as to admit he’d deserted Gore in his time of need.  But no sooner was I trying to solve that mystery than a little voice in my head that sounded a lot like Jackie Mason was screaming: “How could he have been so dumb?  Schmuck, he’s a liberal!”

That being the case, you have to wonder why in so many other areas, they go out of their way to ignore or even deride the values and beliefs of most Americans. When it comes to such things as same-sex marriage, tax-funded abortions or the alleged villainy of the U.S. Military, Hollywood is consistently out of step with the majority and they’re darn proud of it.

Often the funniest lines delivered by these celebrities occur when they exchange marriage vows. The most appropriate musical accompaniment isn’t Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” but a couple of rim shots after the “I do’s.” On occasion, the marriage is over before the gifts have been unwrapped, sometimes even before the cake has been cut.

For instance, Julia Roberts/Lyle Lovett (21 months); Michael Jackson/Lisa Marie Presley (19 months); Charlie Sheen/Donna Peele (14 months); Jennifer Lopez/Chris Judd (7 months); Pamela Anderson/Kid Rock (5 months); Renee Zellwegger/Kenny Chesney (4 months); Nicolas Cage/Lisa Marie Presley (4 months); Drew Barrymore/Jeremy Thomas (6 weeks); Carmen Electra/Dennis Rodman (9 days); Dennis Hopper/Michelle Phillips (8 days); and, a drum roll, please: Britney Spears/Jason Alexander (55 hours).

Some of these ceremonies no doubt took place at Las Vegas chapels, but a couple of them, I suspect, occurred at local In-N-Out Burger stands, where the marriage certificates came with an order of fries.

There are a few things we can take away from all this. One is that hope springs eternal. Another is that lust, at least when combined with a great deal of alcoholic consumption, trumps common sense and more red flags than you’d see in Moscow, on May Day.

But the most important lessons of all are, one, if you are ever invited to a Lisa Marie Presley wedding, try not to sit near the front if you’re going to giggle and, two, when shopping for a wedding gift, don’t bother springing for the top of the line toaster oven.

Perhaps that also helps to explain why nearly all of them are liberals.  When all that one hears all day long is left-wing claptrap — and especially when future employment demands acquiescence to the prevailing tenets — it’s easy to understand the half-baked inanities these wienies so arrogantly espouse.  They speak of tolerance as if it’s something they copyrighted, but they despise everyone who isn’t in lockstep with them.  Although they make their living with words, when it comes to debating the opposition, they rely on a mantra of “racist,” “fascist,” “bigot” and “homophobe.”

This isolation from large segments of the population, relying strictly on other members of the industry for one’s social and intellectual life, might also explain why even major stars subscribe to the blathering of someone like Barack Obama, who carries on very much like a movie star.

It occurred to me that even without make-up, stars don’t seem to age at the same rate as the rest of us.  It’s not all thanks to Botox and plastic surgery, hairpieces and stomach stapling.  When you’re a movie star, as rich as Midas, as pampered as Madame Pompadour, you are spared all the day-to-day travails that wear down the rest of us.  Stars have drivers, managers, secretaries, gofers and nannies, to take care of all their needs — everything from picking up his dry cleaning to raising the kids. 

A tragedy in a star’s life is getting a smaller trailer than the female lead.  A hardship in that world is having to get up early in the morning so that some guy who had to wake up even earlier can chauffeur him to the studio, where someone else will dress him and apply his makeup, so that a third person can then guide him safely around the scenery and tell him how to say his lines.   

Except that he may have less time for golf and vacations, it’s a lot like being the president.  One main difference is that the star has to pay for his own bodyguards, while the rest of us have to pay for the president’s.

Living that sort of privileged life, even Methuselah, on his deathbed, wouldn’t have looked a day over 450.

Warren Beatty once said that at some point in his life, every man should experience being a motion picture star.  His message was that such fortunate individuals never have to pursue women because women pursue them.  He’s right, of course.  The odd thing is that movie stars don’t have to look like young Mr. Beatty or Brad Pitt to be chick magnets.  I have known a lot of actors, a great many of whom looked more like me than they did like George Clooney, but even they had to beat off women with a stick; although, truth be told, they generally left the stick in the closet or out in the tool shed.

It took me a long time to figure out the attraction.  I finally decided that women spend a good deal of their time fantasizing and, so, when they are with a professional actor, it seems only natural to fantasize they are co-starring in a movie, even if it’s X-rated.

I suspect that an additional bonus is that any guilt they might otherwise have experienced over having sex with a perfect, or perhaps I should say, an imperfect stranger, is easily dispelled by the notion that it was only a movie after all, and that, like every ditsy actress who’s ever done a tacky nude scene, she, too, was merely doing it for her art!

These days, there is another blacklist taking place, but they’re calling it a graylist because the victims are scriptwriters who made the stupid career decision of allowing themselves to become gray-haired or, in some distinguished cases, even bald. 

Back in 1999, a class action suit was initiated by about 150 of us.  Today, there are over 600 of us who are plaintiffs suing the various studios, networks and major talent agencies, for conspiring to blacklist WGA members on no other basis than their age. 

Some people might find it ironic that Hollywood’s liberals, who are still inflamed over a blacklist that took place 60 years ago, not only condone it in their hometown, but practice it every day of their lives. For those of us involved in the lawsuit, it’s been an interesting decade.  Those among us who don’t play golf find it helps fill the time.  The lawyers on the other side have done everything in their power to delay a court judgment.  The masochists among us particularly enjoyed the interrogatories. Not only did they want us to recall the date of every meeting we ever had with any of the defendants, but what was said, by whom, if we got the assignments and, if so, when was the script shot, when did it air and how much were we paid.  By this time, some of us have a hard time recalling what we had for lunch.           

It’s quite obvious that the defendants figure time is on their side, that all they have to do is wait us out and we’ll start dropping like flies, like very old flies.  Fat chance!  What they haven’t taken into account is that the lawsuit is providing some of us with the will to live that we might not otherwise have.           

Not to sound too cynical, but when I saw Abe Polonsky leading a picket line composed of unrepentant Commies outside the Academy Awards in 1999, and saw Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Nick Nolte, and a few other Tinseltown pinheads, sitting on their hands and sneering when 90-year-old Elia Kazan came on stage to collect his honorary Oscar, it merely reminded me once again how hypocritical, rude and self-righteous the liberals in this town can be.      

In spite of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Boomerang!” “Gentleman’s Agreement,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Viva Zapata,” “East of Eden” and “On the Waterfront,” Hollywood’s political elitists couldn’t get over the fact that 50 years earlier Kazan had, as they say, named names.  What’s more, he made no secret of the fact that he was proud to have named the names of those he regarded as the enemies of his adopted country.           

The truth is that long before the Reds got it in the neck for pledging allegiance to the Soviet Union, conservatives were persona non grata at many of the studios.  In the 60s, I met and interviewed Morrie Ryskind.  For those of you unfamiliar with the name, he had shared the Pulitzer Prize for “Of Thee I Sing,” had been Oscar-nominated for “Stage Door” and “My Man Godfrey,” and had also written “Penny Serenade” and a few of the Marx Brothers movies, including “Animal Crackers” and “A Night at the Opera.”  In spite of having far more impressive credits than any of the pinheads collectively known as the “Hollywood 10,” he had not had a screen credit in several years because he was regarded as a political reactionary.           

The “Hollywood 10” were also known as the Unfriendly 10, which once led my old friend, Billy Wilder, to remark, “Only two of the 10 had talent; the others were just unfriendly.”           

Finally, as we all know, the patron saint of Hollywood, a town dedicated to back-stabbing and betrayal, is Lucretia Borgia, and the fact of the matter is that the bottom feeders have no real objection to naming names.  It’s only when they’re the names of left-wingers that there’s a problem.  Had Kazan named fascists or, better yet, card-carrying Republicans, the motion picture community would have erected a statue of the man at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and, for good measure, changed the name of its major award from the Oscar to the Elia.

“Termites”  is only available through Amazon or, for an autographed copy, by sending a check or money order for $20 to cover shipping and handling to Scorched Earth Press, 16604 Dearborn Street, North Hills, CA 91343-3604.

Although, as a rule, those people who star in movies are more obnoxious than their colleagues in television – perhaps because we’re not inviting them into our homes – the folks on TV tend to be even whinier.           

The question that comes to mind is when appearing on the tube went from being a well-paid privilege to being an inalienable right. 

So far as I know, it first became an issue when “Murder She Wrote,” a CBS staple from 1984 to 1996, was canceled.  The phenomenon may have pre-dated that event, but that’s when I became aware of the sea change.  Prior to that, diehard fans were naturally disappointed whenever one of their favorite shows bit the dust, but it was understood that nothing went on forever. 

However, in 1996, Angela Lansbury went ballistic over her show’s demise, even though it had already made her enormously wealthy.  As I recall, Ms. Lansbury felt that CBS had not treated her and the show with the proper reverence.  She didn’t seem to realize that a pink slip is a pink slip, and should not be confused with a condolence card.  In any case, I felt that someone should have pointed out to the lady that CBS is a corporation and not a friend of the family – although God knows this particular corporation had been enormously generous to her family, most of whom had wound up on the show’s payroll – and that a 13-year run is about as reverential as TV ever gets. 

Since then, every time a show gets axed because of poor ratings or lousy demographics or because the star is so deeply into drugs that she can’t read a cue card, we have come to expect the likes of Ellen Degeneres, Jane Seymour and Brett Butler, to accuse cold-hearted corporate robots of having it in for them.  The fact of the matter is that any TV network would be only too happy to hire Osama bin Laden to host a game show if they could only work out a deal.  There is a reason, after all, they call it the bottom line. 

Will we ever forget the media frenzy over Ted Koppel’s possible cancellation and the spectacle of Bill Maher’s carrying on over the axing of “Politically Correct” as if it was another of those notorious right-wing conspiracies?  The plain fact of the matter is that nobody had been tuning in “Nightline” for years, except to see if Koppel had finally found a decent barber.  As for Maher, I personally don’t know anyone who hadn’t grown tired of his incessant, adolescent gushing over the sheer wonderfulness of marijuana.  So, while his 9/11 comments about the cowardice of the American military may have cost him an advertiser or two, did he really expect that his talk show, which was neither entertaining nor enlightening, was entitled to an eternal slot on the schedule? 

From whence comes this bizarre sense of entitlement?  And how is it that modestly talented people who have been made ridiculously rich and famous feel compelled to bite the hands that have fed them so well?  What ever happened to simple, old-fashioned gratitude?  More to the point, why do any of us hop aboard their ugly little, ego-powered, bandwagons?

And, finally, I’d like to know if Angela Lansbury ever sent Christmas cards and birthday gifts and little love notes to CBS during any of those 13 years they were going together.

“Termites”  is only available through Amazon or, for an autographed copy, by sending a check or money order for $20 to cover shipping and handling to Scorched Earth Press, 16604 Dearborn Street, North Hills, CA 91343-3604.

The world, after all, saw friends and families divided in America during the 1860s and in Germany in the 1930s and now we see it here.  On the one side, we have Americans who believe that, in spite of its flaws, America is the greatest, most generous, nation on the face of the earth.  On the other side, you have Americans who believe that this nation is a house of horrors that has to be radically transformed by the radical transformer in the Oval Office, which these days should be renamed the Offal Office. 

If you’re convinced, as I am, that Barack Obama is the greatest menace America has ever faced — a far graver danger than Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Islamic fascism, simply because they all lacked the ability or determination to destroy our Constitution — losing a few friends and relatives is no big deal. 

If we only had to worry about Obama, it would be bad enough.  But he has all those moral rejects to do his bidding.  People like Pelosi, Reid, Axelrod, Waxman, Emanuel and Barney Frank, are ready and anxious to serve their lord and master.  He says, “Jump!” and they ask “How high?”  Some of us thought his earlier friends and associates — people like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko — were bad, but we didn’t realize he’d ferret out even bigger weasels in Washington. 

Psychiatrists are forever seeking the cause and cure of various diseases.  They have focused on everything from paranoia to schizophrenia and clinical depression, but I think it’s high time they turned their attention to liberalism.  It’s far more prevalent than those other mental disorders, and it appears to be particularly rampant among journalists, lawyers, union leaders and academics.  Blacks, Jews and the young, are especially susceptible.  And for reasons not entirely clear, it seems to strike hardest at people who reside near the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  So perhaps salt water plays a part in it. 

The symptoms are all too obvious.  Liberals will believe the silliest things said to them so long as they’re said by left-wing politicians, who form something of a priesthood for atheists.  Liberals accept lies about man-made global warming and the extinction of polar bears and glaciers, while simultaneously rejecting objective evidence that the earth has been cooling off for the past decade, that the polar bear population has been exploding at a rate that suggests Viagra has been introduced into their diet and that, in spite of all the hot air Al Gore has been spewing, we have as much ice as ever. 

Furthermore, liberals are convinced that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant and that “separation of church and state” actually exists in the U.S. Constitution.

As gullible as liberals are, there are certain things that they oppose with every fiber of their being.  Among them are nuclear energy, a strong U.S. military, Judeo-Christian values and traditions, America’s exceptionalism and, of course, the 2nd amendment.  They pay lip service to the 1st amendment, but in their hearts they believe it only pertains to them. 

As bad as the run of the mill liberals are, their leaders are worse.  Against all logic, Barack Obama believes that the way for the nation to get out of debt is by spending trillions more.  He reminds me of the shopaholic who figures that if an $80 toaster is marked down to $75, all he has to do is buy 100 of them and he’ll make $500. 

Speaking of making money, lately it seems like every radio show I listen to and every TV show I watch is jam-packed with commercials for gold.  I have no idea if gold is a great investment, but I keep wondering why, if it’s as good as they claim, these folks are so anxious to sell it. 

I mean, if I were in the clothing business, I see where I’d want to sell as many shirts, socks and suits as I could.  I mean, what the heck am I going to do with them?  But if gold is going to keep going up, why sell it to a bunch of strangers?  Why not just hang on to it? 

The other question is: If gold is going to continue rising in value because the dollar is going to plummet like a stone, what are they going to do with all those worthless greenbacks once they unload all their gold? 

I mean, are they running a business or a charity?

What brought this to mind was discovering that it was the late Tim Russert who labeled liberal states blue and conservative states red.  Inasmuch as red had long represented the Soviet Union and the politics of those lunkheads around the globe who were devoted to Communism, I wonder if Russert had intentionally set out to muddy the waters or if he, too, had had a sinister older sister. 

A great many people, including right-wingers who should know better, have given Obama high marks for antagonizing his liberal base by deploying 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.  For one thing, General McChrystal had started out requesting 80,000 additional men and then lowered his request to 40-60,000 when it became obvious that Obama, even after spending two years insisting that Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, was a good war that had to be won, actually believed that he could personally beguile Al Qaeda and the Taliban as easily as he had America’s lap dog media. 

For another thing, there was no political risk for Obama.  Did anyone think that his core constituency was going to desert him in 2012 and vote for, say, Sarah Palin?  The truth is, Obama could order the military to bomb London, Paris and Rome, and his liberal disciples would continue to sing his praises. 

Unlike Republicans, who will stay home on election day if the party nominee doesn’t pass a litmus test of political purity, liberals will fall into line for any cretin who has a (D) after his or her name.  Actually, when you realize how many agnostics and atheists are liberal, it’s amazing how religiously devout they are when it comes to politicians.  So it is that in every election — even without the evil machinations of the SEIU, ACORN and the Chicago machine — the party of really stupid people has a definite advantage. 

Although left-wingers regard themselves as brilliant and sophisticated, they actually place the likes of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Waxman, Kerry, Murtha, Leahy, Frank, Conyers, Waters, Biden, Lee and Dodd, on pedestals. 

Speaking of Obama, I have finally caught on to why everything he proposes, from the stimulus plan to health care reform, always comes with a price tag of 800 to 900 billion dollars.  It’s the same reason that retailers so often sell stuff for $19.99 or $99.99.  It’s all intended to con us.  Just as we’re supposed to think we got the t-shirt for less than $20 and the sweater for under $100, we’re supposed to be grateful that at least Washington’s latest lousy idea isn’t going to cost us a trillion dollars. 

It’s a shame that politicians are a necessary evil.  Some are more necessary than others, but, for the most part, they’re just plain evil.

 In fact, being a half-full glass kind of guy, I’d like to think that every time a politician lies, an angel gets his wings.

What I remember best about the show, the tunes aside, is that at the point when Tinkerbell’s light was flickering, and she was supposedly at death’s door, the audience was urged to start clapping in the hope that our applause would somehow save her.  Suddenly a woman seated behind me leaned forward and said, “Little boy, you aren’t clapping.  Don’t you want Tinkerbell to live?”

“I know the story,” I told her.  “She’ll live even if nobody claps.”

You can see that, as young as I was, the die was already cast.  Even back then, I had zero tolerance for baloney.  That is one of my many problems with Barack Obama and his crew of cronies and stooges.  They’re trying to make me clap for crapola like cash for clunkers, cap and trade, trillion dollar stimulus bills, AmeriCorps, ACORN, unlimited funds for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, socialized medicine and global warming.

On top of all that, look at the cast he’s rounded up for this tacky production.  People used to say they wouldn’t buy a used car from Richard Nixon.  Well, I wouldn’t buy a used hubcap from the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Alan Grayson, Christopher Dodd, Barbara Boxer, Charles Rangel, Rahm Emanuel, Cass Sunstein or David Axelrod.  Furthermore, I’ve seen guys selling “genuine mink coats” out of the trunk of a ’94 Buick I’d trust more than Robert Gibbs.

It struck me the other day how beneficial a nickname can be.  For instance, would Magic Johnson have been quite as magical if people had called him Earvin?  Would Tiger Woods, however good his golf game, been quite as effective a pitchman if we’d all called him Eldrick?  And would Barack Hussein Obama been able to pull the wool over so many eyes if he hadn’t been called the Messiah?

Barack pretends to be George Bailey, everyone’s best friend, but from the way he pushed ObamaCare through the Senate by using any means necessary — including bribes and intimidation — it’s obvious that behind the nice guy facade, he is actually Henry F. Potter, weaving his web like a giant spider, plotting to turn beautiful Bedford Falls, otherwise known as America, into the nightmarish Pottersville.

Two centuries ago, King George III was told that President George Washington, who had eight years earlier turned down the opportunity to be the king of the United States, was planning to give up the presidency at the conclusion of his second term and return to his farm in Mount Vernon.  The astonished monarch, who had lost a war to General Washington, said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Washington did, and he was.

Does anything more clearly illustrate how far we have fallen in 210 years?

[Ed. Note: Our duelling "Wonderful Life" posts are nothing more than one of those odd coincidences.]

For one thing, liberals are hypocritical. They have agendas when they’d be better off having principles. They praise whistle-blowers and investigative reporters, but only when Republicans, conservatives and/or the U.S. military suffer the consequences. So it was that they lionized Daniel Ellsberg for turning the Pentagon Papers over to the NY Times and heralded Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for their Watergate expose, but demanded that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles be prosecuted for their ACORN videos and wanted the computer hackers who uncovered the East Anglia emails, the ones proving global warming to be a major hoax, to be tarred and feathered.

I even remember when Time magazine put a group of highly publicized corporate whistle-blowers on their cover, hailing their courage and patriotism. Long before Time Magazine decided its cover boy would be Ben Bernanke, I was willing to wager that O’Keefe and Giles wouldn’t be Time’s 2009’s People of the Year.

When George W. Bush convinced a mere 42 countries to join us in the invasion of Iraq, liberals insisted he had gone off half-cocked. However, when Obama couldn’t convince any country to take the Guantanamo prisoners off our hands and could only get 40 nations to commit to joining us in Afghanistan, those on the left insisted he was a master of diplomacy.

The liberals keep telling us that, thanks to Obama’s policy of speaking endlessly and carrying a very small stick, America has gained renewed respect around the world. But, as usual, they don’t specify which countries respect us more these days now that they have good reason to fear us less. We know pretty darn well they’re not referring to Russia, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, Syria or China. They’re not even able to point to such erstwhile allies as Poland, Israel and the Czech Republic, all of whom are staggering around these days with American-made switchblades in their back.

Liberals, as well as a great many conservatives, were upset with George W. Bush for his massive spending. But these days, when Obama is quadrupling the deficit, the Left is cheering him on. Can you imagine what liberals would be saying if a Republican president announced something as nutty as Obama’s promise to spend his way to solvency?

For that matter, what would a typical liberal say if, after he broke the news that they were on the brink of bankruptcy, his wife’s response was to head out the front door, and when he asked her where she was going, she replied, “I’ll be back in a minute, honey, I’m just running out to pick up a few things at Tiffany’s”? Is there a jury in America that would find him guilty if he busted a chair over her head? But when it’s Obama going out the door to drop a few trillion on cap and trade and ObamaCare, the liberals just shake their heads like besotted newlyweds and say, “Isn’t he just cute as a button?”

The worst thing about liberalism isn’t even the lying and the double standards, but the fact that it’s contagious. For example, not too long ago, I heard Bill O’Reilly state that it was good for America that Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. He said with a reasonably straight face that he liked the fact that the world saw us as a peaceful nation. I thought I could avoid such things by avoiding MSNBC. I was wrong. Instead, I thought my head would explode.

Barack Obama got the Prize for the very same reason that Jimmy Carter got it. They got it because they weren’t George W. Bush. The wooly-headed leftists in Norway keep making stupid decisions, handing out these medallions to the likes of Le Duc Tho, Kofi Anan, Desmond Tutu and Yasser Arafat, and clucks like Carter and Obama keep jetting over to Oslo to be clucked over.

If I were President Prelutsky and they tried to demean my reputation that way, I would not only reject the award, I would point out that the U.S. military has done more for the cause of world peace than all the diplomats and pacifists put together. Then I’d have someone teach me a little Norwegian so that I could tell them in their own language where they could put their damn Peace Prize.