For a long time, I’ve thought that people must be really starved for role models if they keep looking to those in the public arena to fill the vacuum.

I am not one of those people who believe that every politician is venal and corrupt, but neither am I someone who thinks that we should admire those whose only accomplishments consist of casting votes and giving speeches.

Recently, Robert Gates garnered a great deal of attention for writing a book in which he took Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, to task. Once you got past the totally insincere compliments he apparently felt obliged to pay the first two, he basically made a case that none of them was to be trusted. Inasmuch as I had already come to that conclusion without his prompting, my question is why he didn’t resign when he first discovered the truth about them.

I suppose a possible defense would be that he felt he could do more good on the inside than he could as an outsider, except that he quickly discovered he had no real influence when it came to policy. So, in reality, the only purpose he served was as a token for Obama, who could point to Gates and claim he’d reached out to a Republican to serve as his Secretary of Defense.

The fact is that with a President as partisan as Obama, no Republican is going to have any real effect on him. It’s a mistake reminiscent of the one that women often make when they decide they can transform a bully into a pussycat by marrying him. The only change they can honestly expect is that they’ll turn a bum who abuses his girlfriends into a bum who abuses his wife.

In the case of Christie, it shouldn’t have taken the bridge scandal to open the eyes of those morons who decided he should be our answer to Hillary in 2016. It’s one thing for a guy who comes off like a thug to be the governor of New Jersey, and quite another to have his rump perched in the Oval Office.

It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Christie, tapped to deliver Romney’s nominating address at the Republican convention, spent so much time prattling on about himself that he seemed to forget who the nominee actually was. Not since Obama took all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden, had anyone crammed so many personal pronouns into a single speech.

The next thing we knew, there was Christie, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, just a week prior to the presidential election, walking hand-in-hand with Obama. It looked so much like an eHarmony TV commercial, I almost expected the announcer to point out they both enjoy bubble baths, cuddling and midnight strolls on moonlit beaches. It was such an unsightly spectacle that some folks suggested the two of them should have rented a room.

Some females – generally, but not exclusively, young girls – are apparently so lacking in appropriate role models, they look to real life models for their inspiration. What they fail to understand is that whereas the average American woman is 5'4" and weighs 140 pounds, the typical model, those human giraffes they wish to emulate, on average are 5'11" and weigh110 pounds.

Recently, a reader took me to task for lumping all teachers as “brain-dead.” He went on to state that he knew a great many teachers “who work very hard, care a great deal about their students and don’t agree with many of the policies that are put in place by New York State.”

He went on at some length, and I had no reason to question his intelligence or doubt his sincerity. But that didn’t prevent me from writing back: “I have no doubt that there are some teachers who are not brain-dead. But the fact that they have not risen up and done something about their union suggests they might as well be.

"Those who run the teaching programs at colleges are always extremely liberal, so it is no surprise that the entire profession is dedicated to promoting leftist policies and supporting Obama with their votes and their union dues. They are as dense and as predictable as social workers. Furthermore, it is no surprise that they are constantly embarrassing themselves by suspending little boys from school for pointing their fingers and going "Bang!” or, in other words, for behaving like little boys.

“What do your teacher friends say about their colleagues in Wisconsin who trashed the capitol building a few years back when Gov. Scott Walker and the legislature voted to cut future pensions because of the impending state bankruptcy and who, moreover, got phony medical excuses to cover their absences from the classroom? Worst of all, the members of the mob insisted they were doing it all for the children, thus adding hypocrisy to their laundry list of sins and misdemeanors.

"There are two reasons that better results are achieved in private schools, be they religious or secular, in spite of having far less money available; one, the parents are more involved and, two, the teachers are paid to teach, not to indoctrinate.

"There was a time when teachers were actually underpaid. That day has come and gone. And for all their usual blather about how wonderful public schools are, I wager that no more than five percent of Democratic office holders have their kids enrolled in them. And when it comes to those residing in Washington, D.C., I’m wagering it’s 0%.”

Speaking of schools, the Civil Rights office in the Department of Education thinks it’s because of racism that black and Hispanic students are suspended or kicked out of schools for disciplinary infractions far more often than white kids.

Just curious, but has it occurred to these bureaucratic pinheads that the lack of discipline might somehow be the result of illegitimacy rates that show that 72.3% of black kids are being raised by unmarried women, 53.3% of Hispanic kids and only 29.1% of white kids?

I grant that 29.1% is nothing to brag about. That is until you compare it to what’s going on in the minority communities, where the overwhelming majority of males have gone AWOL, leaving it up to all those terrible white bigots to support their women and children.

But I expect it’s too much to ask that people who are being paid to spot civil rights infractions ever bother looking into the actual source of the problem. After all, as the schools, the media and left-wing politicians keep insisting, members of minority groups must never be held responsible for their problems.

Besides, it’s so much easier and a lot more fun to simply holler “Racism!” in a crowded theater.