I used to be what I thought was a liberal. If, at the time, anyone had asked me to explain myself, I would have said that I opposed Jim Crow laws, that I believed workers were entitled to make a decent wage and work in a safe environment, and that American citizens shouldn’t be discriminated against because of their race, religion or national origin.

I quit being a liberal because I didn’t believe that members of particular minority groups deserved advantages denied to others, that illegal aliens weren’t entitled to anything but a swift kick to the backside, that being a devout Christian didn’t make you a bad person, and that capitalism was a system that worked, while socialism not only didn’t work but most often turned into tyranny.

I honestly don’t know why there are so many liberals today and I certainly can’t imagine why they have such a lousy agenda. I have come up with a theory. Here in California, roughly 30 years ago, because of budget cuts, a great many people were released from insane asylums. They wound up living in the streets, which explains the large number of homeless people, even though Democrats would have you believe that those are normal people who simply lost their jobs along the way.

Even after the state became more solvent, it became almost impossible to get these poor souls back into institutions where they could be fed, clothed and given their meds, because the ACLU lawyers fought for their inalienable right to starve, freeze and use the sidewalks of your city as their combination bedroom, living room and bathroom.

Inevitably, they also got to vote. As a result, the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonio Villaraigosa, Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, wound up winning all the major elections. I mean, the truth is, you’d have to be crazy to vote for those people.

I have to suspect that a similar scenario took place all over the country. How else to explain that two-thirds of Americans actually believe that Barack Obama’s policies will save our economy? I’m not even a Christian, but I find it bizarre that people who pooh-pooh the idea that Christ raised the dead or walked on water are totally convinced that a guy who’s tossing trillions of dollars into the air is a financial miracle worker. Talk about blind faith!

It makes me wonder if these same people, were they facing personal bankruptcy, would think that the answer to their own financial difficulties would be to give their wife an American Express card and drop her off at Tiffany’s.

If liberals aren’t simply insane, they surely must be hypocrites. Why else would they insist that spending eight years bashing President Bush and comparing him, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, to the Nazi High Command was patriotic, but merely questioning President Obama’s qualifications, judgment and policies makes one a racist?

How is it that when, between 2000 and 2006, when the GOP had control of the Oval Office, the House and the Senate, on those rare occasions they didn’t do the bidding of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha or Charles Schumer, they were condemned as divisive? However, when Obama and his left-wing cronies rushed through a trillion dollar stimulus package and a pork-filled budget over Republican objections, nobody in their crowd cried “Foul!” or insisted on reaching across the aisle for a group hug and a few choruses of “Kumbaya”?

Before anyone bothers sending an e-mail reminding me that three Republican senators voted with the Democrats on the stimulus bill, I haven’t forgotten. But, let’s face it -- the two ladies from Maine are merely the east coast version of Boxer and Feinstein. As for Arlen Specter, I suspect that along the way, he’ll switch to the Extraterrestial Party if, as he inches closer to being a hundred years old, he decides that’s his best chance of winning an election.

I know that people such as Sen. Specter and Sen. Jeffords would have us believe that they switched parties because of their principles, but I would prefer it if they only said such silly things in the hope of making me laugh. That’s because I love to laugh, but I hate being taken for a fool. I mean, really, Jim Jeffords wakes up one day when he’s 67 years old and Specter opens his eyes at the age of 79 and suddenly decide that the GOP isn’t as conservative as they’d like, so the solution is to link left arms with the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank?

Something else that makes me wonder if, in a nicer, kinder world, liberals wouldn’t be housed in a warm place where they’d be kept safely away from sharp objects and voting booths, is their notion of what constitutes torture. In my world, cutting off Daniel Pearl’s head, throwing Anne Frank in an oven or having to listen to Chris Matthews, is torture. But by no means is it playing loud music, keeping people awake, making them share space with a caterpillar or even dousing them with water, in order to get them to cough up information that might prevent another 9/11 or keep American soldiers from being ambushed. Continued...