I acknowledge that charity is one of the virtues, but I have a hard time accepting the way it works. For one thing, I don’t know why people often insist that it be anonymous. To me, a critical part of accepting charity is to express gratitude to the giver. Otherwise, or so it seems to me, people will inevitably come to accept it as their due.

I also do not understand that which strikes me as charity in perpetuity. For instance, every time I turn on my radio I’m hearing commercials calling for donations to feed the poor in Haiti. I’m told how little it will cost me to feed x-number of Haitian kids for x-number of months for x-number of dollars. But inasmuch as I’ve been hearing these same commercials for years now, I keep wondering how it is that nobody has ever taught Haitians how to fish and how to grow their own crops. Is this an entire nation that relies entirely on the generosity of American radio listeners in the same way that generations of Americans have come to depend on the largesse of the American taxpayer?

When I heard that two people had actually broached security at the White House, my first thought was that my friend, Ronald Kessler, had bribed them in order to hype sales of his recent “The First Family Detail.” I even sent him an email accusing him of coming up with a great marketing strategy. After all, if you take anything away from his terrific book, aside from confirmation that Jimmy Carter and the Clintons are as putrid a trio of human beings as you can imagine, it’s that the most recent directors of the Secret Service will gladly take a cleaver to the department’s budget in order to make themselves look good. In that respect, they are exactly like the administrators at the V.A., who didn’t care how many military veterans died, so long as they could make themselves look efficient.

My idea of a great administrator was the late Admiral Chester Nimitz. Richard Ryan called him to my attention after reading a book he purchased at the shop connected to the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii. The book, Nimitz’s “Reflections on Pearl Harbor,” relates how Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington, D.C., on December 7th, 1941, when he received a phone call from FDR, telling him he was to assume command of the Pacific Fleet.

When Nimitz landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, he found such devastation that it would have been easy to imagine the Japanese had already won the war in the South Pacific. After touring the harbor and cataloging the sunken battleships and naval vessels cluttering the waters, a disheartened young helmsman asked Nimitz what he thought.

The Admiral said, “The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force has ever made. Mistake number one was that they attacked on a Sunday. As a result, ninety percent of the crewmen were ashore on leave. If the same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk, we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.

"Mistake number two: When the Japanese saw all those ships lined up in a row, they got so carried away with sinking them, they never once bombed our dry docks. If they had destroyed the docks, we would have had to tow every one of those ships to America to be repaired. Instead, the ships are in shallow water and can be raised, and a tug can haul them over to the docks. They can be repaired and back at sea in the same time it would have taken us to haul them back to the States.

"Mistake number three: Every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is in top of the ground storage tanks five miles away on the other side of that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our entire fuel supply.

"I’d have to say God was looking out for America.”

One of the ironies of life is that we have a president who spends most of his time at fund-raisers, hitting up liberals at $35,000-a-plate dinner at the same time that Democrats whine about people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson destroying the republic and the election process by doing what they can to level out the playing field. But the fact of the matter is that the Obama campaign out-spent John McCain by $300 million in 2008 and out-spent Mitt Romney by $150 million in 2012. The sad fact of the matter is that while the Democrats continue to claim theirs is the party of the poor and the middle class, the only time they care about anyone but themselves and their fat cat supporters is at election time. And don’t think for a minute that they don’t resent having to bow and scrape to those they regard as suckers and bumpkins in pursuit of their votes.

Speaking of liberals, back on September 11th, I wrote a letter to Governor Jerry Brown. After all this time, I have to assume he has chosen not to reply. If he changes his mind, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, this is what I wrote:

“Dear Governor Brown: You seem like a bright enough fellow, and yet in spite of polls showing that most people in the state now oppose the construction of a train running between San Francisco and L.A., you continue to push for it.

"Why on earth would you want to squander billions of dollars on a train that very few people will ever use because, one, the drive only takes about six hours and, two, once you reach your destination, you still need to rent a car.

"The train seems to be nothing more than a make-work project to keep the unions happy. But why waste the time and money on a project you must know will ultimately be referred to as ‘Jerry’s Folly’ when you could do something useful with all that money and still satisfy the unions by building a system of dams?

"After all, drought, as even you must be aware, is a recurring problem for everyone in California, except, perhaps, for the folks at Sparkletts.”