Burt Prelutsky

Even back in the 1960s when I was in my 20s and a registered Democrat, I refused to call myself a liberal. To me, liberals were those of my fellow collegians who dodged the draft and pretended it was character and not cowardice that sent them north to Canada or those others who evaded service through deferments and medical fraud, but got to display their moral superiority by spitting on returning veterans.

Even that long ago, I couldn't quite decide if it was their lack of spine or their hypocrisy that I found more reprehensible.

On top of everything else, it didn't help that I hated their music, their movies, their fads, their lack of personal hygiene and their infantile slogans.

It never occurred to me that 50 years later, they and their goofy offspring would be America's school teachers, professors, journalists, judges, union leaders and politicians, and that they'd still be mucking up the works.

On CNN, on New Year's Eve, viewers got to watch Kathy Griffin ring in 2013 by repeatedly kissing Anderson Cooper's crotch. Lest anyone think that Mr. Cooper was the innocent victim of a desperate aging comedienne, a few days later, he invited her to appear on his own show.

One of the things I hate the most about comics who depend on shock, as opposed to wit, be they Kathy Griffin or Lenny Bruce, isn't that they're simply not funny, but that if you suggest that they'd be well-advised to pursue vocational guidance, they and their slavish fans get to accuse you of prudery. And in our dippy world, it is often far less damaging to one's reputation to be a known drug addict or pederast than to be called a square.

But anyone who thinks it's funny to watch a woman in her 50s pretending to be engaging in oral sex with a gay man on television is the sort of knucklehead who probably relishes every second of the annual 24-hour retrospective devoted to the artistry of The Three Stooges.

I assume that if CNN's ringing in of the New Year got large ratings anywhere, it was probably in San Francisco. That's the place where the City Council only recently got around to banning public nudity, and did so based on the singular grounds that it wasn't sanitary. Only in the modern Sodom would walking around without covering your anus and your genitals be equated with coughing without covering your mouth.

In the run-up to the Fiscal Cliff vote, Harry Reid accused John Boehner of running the House like a dictator. Kathy Griffin should pay heed because that's the sort of material that most normal people think is hilarious. Imagine, the man who has spent four years refusing to allow his 99 colleagues to vote on a federal budget has the unmitigated gall to accuse the Speaker of the House of being high-handed. When it comes to pots calling kettles names, we haven't seen anything like it since Hitler told Mussolini to lighten up.

Obama has vowed to make gun control a major part of his 2013 agenda. In fact, he promises to get to it just as soon as he shortens the length of fairways through presidential fiat.

I, myself, would suggest that colleges begin conducting classes in hypocrisy, starting with people who never show their faces in public without being protected by several heavily-armed men insisting that the rest of us not be trusted anywhere near guns. If attacking the Second Amendment was punishable in a court of law, every limousine liberal from Dianne Feinstein and Michael Bloomberg to Jamie Foxx and Sarah Jessica Parker, would be found guilty of overkill in the first degree.

Left-wingers are quick to blame guns, gun manufacturers and gun sellers, whenever a loony tune goes berserk and shoots up a mall, a school or a movie theater, but when a guy like William Spengler, after bludgeoning his grandmother to death, is free to murder two firemen 30 years down the road, I don't ever hear them condemning those lawyers, judges and parole boards, who played a role in getting him released from prison. Is it possible the reason might be that lawyers, judges and members of parole boards, are, more often than not, liberals like themselves?

Until reading Bernie Goldberg's column on the subject, I had been unaware that Al Gore and his business partners not only refused to sell their failing TV network, Current, to Glenn Beck, but then turned around and sold it to Al Jazeera, the Arab TV network owned by the government of Qatar. Not only does the deal make one question Gore's bona fides as a dedicated foe of carbon emissions, but it shows that in his heart he holds oil sheiks in higher regard than American conservatives.

Still, it turns out that there was one line in the oil-soaked sand that Gore refused to cross. He absolutely insisted that the deal be consummated prior to taxes rising from 36% to 39.6% on the top two percent of wealthy Americans.

But is anyone terribly surprised that when the world's biggest gasbag insisted that it was imperative that taxes be raised on the stinking swine that had the effrontery to be rich, he meant all the pigs in the sty except those who happened to be named Al Gore?