Anyone who’s lived a while has had friends and relatives die, and knows the grief that can overwhelm the survivors. It’s further compounded when the death is a suicide. At such times, you can’t help thinking about what you might have said or done that could have prevented it. That’s how I now feel about America.

I suppose each of us must determine for himself if the crime taking place is suicide by means of a slow-acting poison or murder that can be laid at the feet of homicidal liberals, but I don’t think there can be any question that America is not long for this world.

America’s most precious possession, the Constitution, has been dragged through the mud by those whose egotism is so great that they seem to believe that their whims – whether motivated by honest conviction or for strictly partisan reasons – trumps what a bunch of divinely-inspired, long dead white guys, came up with a couple of hundred years ago.

And unlike what passes for leadership these days – a bunch of braying donkeys and preening peacocks – who never give a thought to anything beyond their next election, these were men who pledged their sacred honor and meant it, and, moreover, had sacred honor to pledge.

One can easily imagine America gazing into her mirror, tears running down her cheeks, thinking that even Alzheimer’s might be a blessing. That way the reflection looking back would remind her how grotesque she has become, but she would at least be spared remembering the beauty that she once possessed.

In the meantime, I think it is criminal that the Supreme Court justices get to take off for so many months. I realize that several of them are getting on in years, but they’re not doing manual labor. In fact, they barely do any mental labor. All the grunt work is done by their staff. Those are the eager beavers whose job it is to hunt down precedence and write up briefs, and then get to brag for the next 50 years that they worked for a judge who owed his judicial career to some political hack.

It seems to me that when the President or members of Congress question the constitutionality of an executive edict or a piece of legislation, it should be fast-tracked to the Supreme Court. Why should it have to go through lower courts when everyone knows the final decision is inevitably going to rest with the Supremes? It’s obviously far more important to decide whether Obama had the authority to change the Affordable Care Act a dozen times or grant executive amnesty to five million illegal aliens than whether the justices give their blessing to same-sex marriages.

And just maybe if the justices didn’t take four month vacations, they’d have time to do both.

I used to think that there should be a way to prevent everyone named Kennedy from seeking political office. I have now come to add the names of Bush and Clinton to that short list. With over 300 million people in the country, I’m sure we can do better.

Speaking of people named Clinton, in spite of having signed a pledge not to accept bribes – I mean, contributions – from foreign nations while Hillary was serving as Secretary of State, it now appears that the Clinton Foundation was raking in all they could grab from Algeria, Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Australia and Oman, between 2009 and 2013.

What is it about that particular job that it keeps getting filled by people from the bottom of the barrel? As bad as Mrs. Clinton was, we now have John Kerry, who is in the process of giving the store away to Iran, the country that has done more to support Islamic terrorism than even Saudi Arabia, just so Obama can brag that he got a nuclear deal signed with the mullahs. The big question about Kerry is how anyone who slandered American soldiers in the 1970s, and lied about his own military service, can wind up running the State Department in 2015.

The ugly truth is that Kerry has said far viler things about his fellow Americans than he ever has about those currently beheading and frying Christians.

Someone once suggested that people get the government they deserve. If true, imagine what that says about us.

In other news, when Stephen Hawking recently decided to boycott an Israeli conference as a way to display his sympathies with the so-called Palestinians, some people wondered how such a brilliant fellow can also be a Jew-hater. How, they muse, can such a brainy chap align himself not only with those who elected Hamas to govern them, but to spit on those who invented the miraculous microchip that allows him to speak?

The answer is that brilliance in one area – outer space in this case – doesn’t mean that one can’t be a nincompoop in every other area. Brilliance is a nice gift, but it’s really no substitute for wisdom and commonsense.

Hawking’s decision also highlights the fact that the two places where you can’t swing a cat without hitting an anti-Semite are the Middle East and among the English intelligentsia.

What I find most startling about this state of affairs isn’t that the likes of Hawking, Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman, to name but a few, hate Jews. In England, as in most of the European nations, hating Jews is what passes for tradition. Sometimes, I even suspect it’s the only exercise they get. The real mystery is that in doing so, they feel the need to identify themselves with the backward savages who subjugate women and homosexuals, do everything in their power to stifle free speech and religious freedom, and, with rather delicious irony, happen to openly despise science, arts and entertainment, and those who are so engaged.

Finally, I am passing along something that has gone viral, but you may have missed it. It is rumored that Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is apparently ready to sign on as a special consultant to Pope Francis.

It seems the Pope wishes to recruit Carroll to be an envoy for the Vatican because he is the first man in history who, on Sunday, February 1st, 2015, caused 100 million people to jump up and yell “Jesus Christ!” in unison.