Whenever liberals defend Planned Parenthood, steam shoots out of my ears when they insist that not a penny of the $500 million they receive from the feds goes towards abortions. Clearly, they assume that everyone is as stupid as they are. Look at it this way: if I have a thousand dollars and you give me $500 on the condition that I don’t spend it buying a gun, all I have to do is spend $500 of my own money on the gun. Then, thanks to your generosity, I still have $1,000 … and a gun!

Speaking of money, when it comes to foreign aid, we’re like the lush who lets his own family starve while he buys drinks for everyone at the saloon. We’re like the lush, but we’re even worse because whereas he’s blowing his own money, we’re borrowing from the likes of China so that we can hand it out to Mexico, Russia, Kenya and our various enemies in the Middle East. And, for good measure, we’re paying interest on the money we’re borrowing. Isn’t it time we stopped acting as the middleman and let them borrow their own damn money?

As I sit here, Donald Trump is riding high in the polls. As most of you know, I was glad to see him actually enter the race, after merely threatening to run several times over the past 20 years. Because I’m something of a gadfly, I like to encourage other gadflies. But I have come to regard him as something of a blowhard and a buffoon. He makes a lot of big promises about how he’s going to make China, Mexico and Iran, toe the line. Well, aside from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who doesn’t want to see that happen? But Trump’s a little sketchy on the details. And, frankly, I don’t see the Ayatollah Khamenei being bowled over by an invitation to eat, drink and play golf, for free at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Country Club in Florida. Vladimir Putin, maybe.

I also wouldn’t make too much of the fact that Trump is at 22% in the polls right now, leading both Walker and Bush by about 10%. It’s not just that the GOP convention is still several months off, but those voters who aren’t in Trump’s corner already, I’m guessing, never will be. Whether they prefer Rubio, Walker, Cruz, Perry, Bush, Fiorina, Jindal, Carson, Huckabee, Santorum or any of the other contenders, the chances are highly unlikely that Trump, whose appeal is mainly that of a loudmouth, is their second, third or even fifteenth choice.

Mainly, I hope that those who adore Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham or any of the others, will suck it up if their personal favorite doesn’t garner the nomination. I know a lot of Republicans like to think that Obama won twice because the Democrats rig voting machines and vote multiple times. But they didn’t win in 2008 and 2012 because they cheated, but because too many on our side stayed home and sulked on Election Day. Then, to compound their sin, they then spent the last seven years griping about this awful administration.

While it’s true that voting is a privilege and not an obligation, if you stay home on November 8, 2016, you have absolutely no right to spend the following four or eight years whining about Hillary Clinton’s reign of terror.

Speaking of which, too many Americans seem to regret that our side won the Revolution. They openly long for royalty. As if it’s not bad enough that we’ve had an emperor for seven years, nearly half of us are now dying to have a queen. And if circumstances or an act of God should somehow prevent Mrs. Clinton’s coronation, those same people will be almost as happy to crown one of the court jesters, Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders.

Because all of my representatives, local, state and national, are liberals, I have no reason to attend townhall meetings with them. But I do wish the rest of you would ask your Republican senators and representatives two questions for me. The first is why Bowe Bergdahl still hasn’t been tried after all this time; the second is why they keep electing Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to leadership roles when neither is capable of leading baby ducklings across a dirt road.

Because I believe in spreading wisdom around, I am happy to share the following:

Cartoonist Robert Quillen once observed, quite aptly, that “A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.”

Honore de Balzac, who obviously knew what he was talking about, said: “When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.”

It so happens that the great French novelist didn’t get married until he was 51, and he died five short months later. Make of that what you will.

Finally, there’s no way that a Minnesota dentist is going to kill an African lion without my commenting on it. I’m not as outraged as most people seem to be. After all, it was a lion, even if someone decided to name it Cecil. It wasn’t someone’s pet. It wasn’t our dog Angel. It was a lion, for heaven’s sake, and five minutes before the dentist hired a couple of schmucks to lure it off a reserve so he could hit it with a spotlight and shoot it with an arrow, it was probably gnawing on Bambi.

Still, there is something comforting in the fact that a guy can blow $50,000 killing an animal in the most pathetic way imaginable and wind up, not with a lion’s head on his wall, but with his own dumb mug on the front page.

There is an old saying that doctors should cure themselves. In the case of this dentist, it seems that before packing for this safari, Walter Palmer should have paused to fill the cavity between his ears.

I understand that a lot of you are hunters, and regard yourselves as sportsmen and would never do the chickenshit stuff the dentist did, but, assuming you’re not hunting in order to feed your families, I confess I don’t grasp the appeal of getting the best of dumb animals. I admit that I don’t shy away from matching wits with liberals, but at least I don’t leave their bloody carcasses lying around to frighten their wives and children.