Although it doesn’t appear in any English translation of Genesis, “a mess of pottage” has come to mean something precious, such as Esau’s birthright, which he surrendered to his twin brother, Jacob, in exchange for something essentially worthless, “pottage” referring to a thin gruel.

That is the bargain that the liberals have made, trading away the glorious endowment handed down by our Founders for the gruel of the welfare state, which demands nothing of the individual except that he continue to vote for more of the same.

I fully understand that the Confederate battle flag raises hackles among a great many people. I also understand that for a lot of Southerners, people who tend to have a great love of their region and a respect for those who fought and died on its behalf, the flag represents a connection to their ancestors, most of whom did not own slaves or even necessarily favor slavery.

I, myself, don’t have a dog in the fight. If those who are offended by seeing the flag fly over their state capitals or see it emblazoned on their license plates decide that enough is enough and decide to fold it up and stick it under glass in a museum, I’m fine with it.

But I would like to point out two salient facts. One, whereas slavery existed under the Confederate flag for a scant four years, it existed under the American flag for seven long decades.

Two, as my friend Steve Maikoski reminds me, if the Confederate flag is so odious that it has to be removed from the sight of decent people, isn’t it time to do something about West Virginia’s obsession with naming things after Robert Byrd? After all, Byrd was a man who rose — if that’s the proper verb to use in noting ascension in such a vile gang — to the rank of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan. In case you don’t remember him, Byrd served six years in the House before moving to the U.S. Senate, where he spent 52 of his eventual 92 years representing West Virginia. Through guile and seniority, he managed to become something on the order of the Kleagle of that not so august body.

Anytime you turn around in West Virginia, you are going to see an institute, a bridge, a street, a library, a high school, a community center, a courthouse, a hospital or a park, named in his honor. If you then walk a few feet in any direction, you will then see a research center, a museum, a school or a garden, named after his wife, Erma Ora Byrd.

I mean, it’s not as if there haven’t been any notable people born in the Mountain State. Just a few of them were Chuck Yeager, Pearl Buck, Jerry West, Mary Lou Retton and Don Knotts. Okay, so maybe that’s most of them, but I’d say they are all more worthy of having stuff named after them than an Exalted Cyclops. On top of that, Byrd wasn’t even born in West Virginia. The swine who grew up to be the acknowledged “King of Pork” in the U.S. Senate was actually born in North Carolina.

I keep hearing from delusional Republicans who are already letting me know that if they don’t absolutely love the GOP candidate in 2016, even if it means Hillary Clinton gets elected, they intend to stay home on Election Day. I simply don’t get it. The truth is I dislike Rand Paul almost as much as I dislike his father, but I would climb off my death bed to vote for him rather than allow Hillary to get within a country mile of the Oval Office.

If for no other reason than that the next president is not only likely to name Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court, but also Antonin Scalia’s, Clarence Thomas’s, Anthony Kennedy’s and Stephen Breyer’s. After all, on Inauguration Day, 2017, Ginsburg will be 84, Scalia, 81, Kennedy, 80 and Breyer 79. And by 2021, they will all be four years older or deceased.

(I wrote that paragraph prior to the Court’s pigheaded justification of the subsidies. It now becomes clear that I was wrong in defending John Roberts back in 2012 when, in spite of the government’s arguing that the Affordable Care Act wasn’t a tax, he decided it was. At the time, I believed he voted the way he did because with the presidential election just months off, he felt Mitt Romney would do away with the ACA, and the Court could thus avoid making a ruling that would be every bit as controversial as Roe v. Wade and the 2000 presidential election.

So, while I would still prefer that a Republican president be the one to nominate justices, I would urge them to do a great deal more vetting than George I did in seating David Souter and George II did when it came to John Roberts.)

For better or for worse, the Supreme Court is the legacy that every president leaves us. When you realize that Bill Clinton gave us Breyer and Ginsburg, and Obama has given us Kagan and Sotomayor, I can’t begin to fathom how any rational human being can accept Hillary Clinton getting to pack the Court with three or four more of these uber-liberal pinheads.

Did everyone notice how eager the very same people who pretend that “separation of church and state” actually appears in the Constitution glommed onto Pope Francis’s encyclical regarding global warming, wrapping themselves in the cozy folds of the papal vestments?

Naturally, they didn’t refer to or even pause to consider his objections to abortions and homosexuality. As they see it, even those officially deemed infallible can be forgiven for being occasionally fallible. For them, the important thing is that Francis parroted Al Gore’s lies about what they both pretend is the greatest danger facing mankind.

The major differences lie in their motives. Gore promotes the hoax because doing so has made him enormously wealthy. Francis’s motivation is even sleazier. He pushes the Doom’s Day narrative because he is a South American communist who despises capitalism and has nothing but contempt for the industrial nations.

Just like Obama, who vowed to destroy the coal and oil industries and send our energy costs soaring, Francis wishes to destroy capitalism even if the end result is that millions of poor people, a great many of them Catholics, will inevitably freeze to death.

In the end, such blatant cynicism may deny the Pontiff sainthood and even, for all I know, keep him out of Heaven, but in the meantime is very likely to garner him a Nobel Peace Prize.