If a few people tell enough lies, a lot of people are sure to believe them. That is certainly the case when it comes to the 14th Amendment. When it was adopted in 1868, its clear intention was to grant citizenship to black slaves, people who were captured and brought to America against their will.

In the years since, it has been twisted into a defense for granting the children of those who sneaked into the country the same rights as those born to American parents. You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to understand that nowhere else are people allowed to be the beneficiaries of criminal acts. You can no more make the legal case for anchor babies by saying that the babies didn’t commit a crime than you could argue that just because the children of a bank robber didn’t drive the getaway car, they get to keep the money.

When you get right down to it, using black slaves to justify illegal aliens is akin to pretending that a kidnap victim is the same as a cat burglar.

Liberals would say that the portion of the 14th Amendment that states that people must be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” only means that so long as illegal aliens obey traffic lights, they’re covered. But what it really means is that you don’t have to pass another amendment in order to nullify the 14th; you merely have to get the folks in Congress to pass legislation that sensibly explains that the 14th Amendment is not an open invitation to break the law.

I understand some of the infatuation that even very bright Republicans have with Donald Trump, even if I don’t share it. After all, he is saying a lot of the things I have been writing over the years. But I shouldn’t be the Commander-in-Chief, either, just because I also love to insult politicians.

I admit I enjoyed seeing Trump’s security guy escorting Univision’s Jorge Ramos out of the room. After all, Ramos is a leftwing apologist for illegal aliens who wasn’t even trying to ask Trump a question. As usual, he was giving a speech. But Trump had no business barring a reporter from the Des Moines Register just because the paper had published an anti-Trump editorial. Freedom of the Press is an essential right. That’s why it’s in the First Amendment. So let us all agree that if it stunk when Obama tried to banish Fox News from his press conferences, it’s no better when done by one of our own.

I also think that when Trump says he’ll never eat another Oreo cookie because Nabisco is moving a factory to Mexico, he deserves to be asked why it is that he has his own men’s clothing line manufactured in China. Inasmuch as the obvious answer is because it’s cheaper to make the suits over there, you would think he would give Ford, Nabisco and the other companies on his hit list, a little slack.

I confess I get a kick out of Trump’s speeches. After all, they’re a lot more fun than listening to Rand Paul nattering on about the NSA, Scott Walker reliving the glory days of 2012 or Jeb Bush trying to put lipstick on the pig known as Common Core. But when considering whom we’d like to see in the Oval Office, shouldn’t we be looking for something better than a combination of Huey Long, Ross Perot, Herman Cain and the populist fraud known as Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, portrayed by Andy Griffith in the 1957 release, “A Face in the Crowd”?

Frankly, I’m surprised that so many people are so excited by the prospect of voting for someone who boasts: “Sure I whine. I whine and whine and whine and then I win.” To me, that sounds like a seven-year-old boasting to his little buddies how he gets his parents to do his bidding. Haven’t we already had one of those in the White House since 2009? Are we really so desperate to have another one?

Increasingly, I find myself longing for the old days when leaders such as Solomon, King David, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Winston Churchill, were only expected to possess wisdom, not the uncanny ability to speak in 15-second sound bites.

Pavlov’s dogs had nothing on Democrats when it comes to reacting in predictable fashion to bells and whistles. Let anyone anywhere be shot, and liberals will immediately start calling for more gun control laws, although even they must have noticed by this time that the cities with the strictest laws, places like Chicago and Baltimore, are the murder capitals of America. They, like the rest of us, must also have noticed that these are cities with extremely high concentrations of blacks.

Unfortunately, it’s not a coincidence. Tragically, wherever you find large groups of black Americans, you will find two things — an absence of fathers in the home and wild black teenage bullies. Whether we’re talking about elephants or human beings, without responsible males around to help raise the kids and keep them in line, you wind up with rogues who lack the self-discipline necessary to control their aggressive natures.

If Democrats were serious about curtailing violence in America, they would send all the state national guard units into urban ghettoes along with the police, armed with warrants granting them the right to conduct house-to-house searches and the authority to arrest anyone in the house where an unlicensed gun was found.

But that would mean offending their political base. So, instead, every time a gangbanger’s errant shot kills a nine-year-old girl sitting on her grandmother’s bed doing her homework or a black thug feels he’s entitled to use a white cop for target practice, Democrats will continue to insist that lax gun laws are the problem.

In conclusion, I will quote poet Rita Dove, who wisely observed that “If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists, are keeping society together.”

Although I agree with Ms. Dove’s sentiments, I’m a little surprised that a poet would choose to communicate in prose. After all, to convey the same thought, she might have written: “If a Kardashian is your ideal/I’m willing to wager you’re a schlimiel.”