If I had to explain Americans to a Martian, I would be hard-pressed. It would be especially difficult when it came to liberals. But, there are even conservatives who confound me.

I suspect that because George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were so respectful of Muslims, constantly telling us that theirs is a religion of peace, some otherwise sensible Americans actually began to believe it.

So it was the other week when a reader, a black woman we’ll call Ms. D, took me to task for an article in which I not only shared my uncensored feelings about the Obamas, but also took the opportunity to attack Affirmative Action.

When people used to conjure up an example of a man frazzled to within an inch of his life, they would refer to a one-armed paperhanger.

Two days ago, I returned from a weekend in San Francisco to learn that my father had died. Sam Prelutsky was born in Russia, in 1901 or 1902. He never knew for certain. It didn’t seem to bother him.

By this time, I’m sure we’ve all heard more than we care to about Professor Henry Gates. Still, I can’t let it go without tossing in my two cents. Admitting he didn’t know the facts of the case didn’t prevent President Obama, allegedly our first post-racial chief executive, from siding with the black professor and admonishing a white Cambridge policeman.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Joe Wurzelbacher raised a lot of hackles in liberal circles when he got Barack Obama to admit he was in favor of the federal government redistributing America’s wealth.

I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America.

Nobody has to tell me things are going from bad to worse in America. The question that preys on my mind is when it was that we began our descent.

Frankly, I’m beginning to feel a lot like Howard Beale, the character portrayed by Peter Finch in the 1976 release, “Network.” He insisted that people get up right now and go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

In case you were off on a different planet and hadn’t heard the news, Michael Jackson died. It was a tragedy. Not that this piece of human rubbish had died, but that the media, including Fox News, carried on as if it was a major loss to mankind.

Conservative pundits keep lecturing us about treating Barack Obama with respect instead of following the example of those nasty liberals who, not satisfied with trashing George W. Bush for eight long years, are still at it.

Being a conservative, I naturally spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to psychoanalyze left-wingers, trying to figure out what makes them tick. God knows I’m not bragging.

On more than one occasion, I have asked myself how it is that in a country where twice as many people call themselves conservatives, liberals are able to control the media, the schools, the courts and are able to put a radical leftist like Barack Obama in the White House.

It used to be said of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that he gave her class and she gave him sex appeal.

Back in 2008, New York Times correspondent David S. Rohde, along with Afghan reporter Taki Luden, were abducted in Pakistan by the Taliban. Because they felt it might adversely affect hostage rescue efforts, the Times requested a news black-out. The Associated Press and other news agencies respected the request and only broke the story recently, after Rohde and Luden had scaled a wall and made their escape. It would be nothing other than a story with a happy ending, except that the Times has time and again ignored the government’s requests that it not report the specific ways in which we were combating Islamic terrorists.

I often find myself thinking that if liberals didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.

A while back, I heard Obama bragging about his first few months in the White House. When he claimed he had done as much in that period as any president in history, my initial thought was that for the first time in his life he was being modest.

The question that’s been weighing on my mind is, who is best suited to study those strange beings known as liberals?

There are times, I must confess, when I consider our current culture and conclude that the Muslims are right about us. We are, as they insist, hedonistic, and far too many of us do have the morals of goats. We do rely on sex and violence for our entertainment. Our popular music is swinish. We are, by a wide margin, the world’s largest market for drugs, both of the legal and illegal variety. Our politicians are selfish, ignorant and, more often than not, at odds with the American ideals of the Founding Fathers.