Burt Prelutsky

Recently, Bill O'Reilly conducted one of his unscientific polls. The question put to his conservative viewers was whether they were able to maintain friendships with liberals. Apparently, 79% of the respondents boasted that they were able to do so. I'm with the 21% who can't.

Keeping in mind that the question only asked about friends and not relatives, those people one can't avoid no matter how hard you try, I have to ask myself what sort of friendships the 79% had in mind. Clearly it's not a relationship that places any importance on values and character. Perhaps these "friendships" imply nothing more than a word we use to describe a group of guys getting together to bowl, play poker or shoot a round of golf. It certainly doesn't involve a mature concern over America's economy, security or future.

Otherwise, if conversation is involved, how do you avoid arguing about differences that involve everything from abortions on demand and voting laws to religious beliefs and America's foreign policy? What common ground is to be found between those who believe that all power should reside with politicians and Washington bureaucrats and those who believe, as the Founding Fathers made clear in the Constitution, that the government that governed least governed best?

Speaking of which, every American, whatever his political leanings, should read the Constitution every once in a while simply to be reminded how few powers are actually granted to the federal government and how many more are left in the hands of the states and the individual.

Of all the truly awful things the Obama administration has been guilty of, perhaps none were as vile as its refusal to grant Ambassador Stevens the additional security he begged for, and to then engage in a cover-up that dwarfed Watergate in its moral depravity. After all, the earlier scandal merely led to a president being disgraced and driven from office; it did not lead to the brutal and preventable murders of four Americans.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta explained that it would have been dangerous to have sent the military in to Benghazi to attempt a rescue of the Americans who were under attack from Islamic terrorists during a seven hour siege. However, if the State Department's response to Ambassador Steven's request for additional security forces hadn't been to deplete the small number he had to begin with, there's a good chance the attacks would never have taken place. Granted, it would have been dangerous to have sent in operatives on 9/11. But does anyone really doubt that Israel would have made the attempt if those under attack had been Israelis?

My own belief is that Obama's court advisor Valerie Jarrett, who apparently twice prevented Obama from giving the order to take out Osama bin Laden, recalled how Jimmy Carter's bungled attempt to rescue the American hostages from Iran in 1979 helped lead to his defeat the following year. And, frankly, anyone who believes that Barack Obama would have risked his re-election over something as trivial as American lives is a nincompoop.

When three weeks before the election, Colin Powell once again endorsed Obama, not even Big Bird was surprised. The surprise is that so many people continue to hold Powell in such high esteem. He is the guy, lest you may have forgotten, who allowed Scooter Libby to be accused of outing Valerie Plame, to be reviled in the media while he swung helplessly in the breeze while awaiting prosecution, when all along Powell knew it was his own assistant, Richard Armitage, who had inadvertently leaked her name.

Apparently he allowed it to happen because Libby was an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, and General Powell, whose own rise through the ranks obviously owed more to affirmative action and the playing of Pentagon politics than to military brilliance, resented the fact that Cheney had more influence with George Bush than he did. In other words, a good man suffered as a result of winding up being a pawn in a Washington version of sibling rivalry.

Liberals are always lecturing conservatives on their lack of civility and compassion, but it was Chris Matthews who praised the timing of Hurricane Sandy because it helped Obama get re-elected. But Ted Turner went him one better, or maybe I should say one worse. According to the alcoholic oracle, the rise in military suicides was a good thing because, as he explained to Piers Morgan, it proves that we human beings are programmed to love and help each other, not to kill one other. However, like most self-righteous pacifists, he neglected to point out what the proper response is to Muslim terrorists who are out to slit our throats.

Keep in mind this is the same saintly Ted Turner who called observers of Ash Wednesday "Jesus freaks" and opponents of abortions "bozos."

He also said, in 2008, that, thanks to global warming, "within 30 or 40 years, most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals."

Other items on Turner's agenda are to drastically cut the military budget and to make certain that American parents have no more than two children.

It should come as no surprise that Mr. Turner has five children.

It is worth noting that one of his three ex-wives was Jane Fonda. Some marriages are referred to as ones made in Heaven. The marriage of the man who donated a billion dollars to the U.N. and the woman who lent aid and comfort to the North Vietnamese was clearly made in quite a different zip code.

Finally, in a recent article, I, a Jew, mistakenly included Dick Durbin, who is apparently a Catholic, on a list of my least favorite Jewish politicians. I based my assumption on the fact that Durbin, like Schumer, Waxman, Lautenberg, Boxer, Franken and Wasserman-Schultz, swims, walks and quacks like a Jewish duck.

Not too long ago, I made a similar mistake regarding Joy Behar. It never entered my mind until a reader set me straight that the resident yenta on "The View" wasn't Jewish. After all, she looked and sounded exactly like all of my aunts and a few of my uncles.