I am familiar with the John Donne poem in which he claims no man is an island, further insisting that any man’s death diminishes him, but I’m afraid I don’t buy it. When a friend of mine dies, I am crushed. But when I pick up a newspaper and read that a thousand strangers halfway around the world have been lost to a tidal wave, I say “Tsk” and turn the page.

What brought this home for me is that when I heard that 30 Navy Seals had been killed in Afghanistan, I felt as if I had lost family members, but if I’d read that 30 members of Congress had suddenly keeled over, I’d simply turn the page. Whether or not I went “Tsk” would depend on their party affiliation. Clearly, I am no John Donne.

Speaking of friends, I am having a harder and harder time remaining even civil to liberals. It isn’t simply a matter of despising their politics and their puppy-like devotion to those who are actually doing their best to destroy our economy, along with our traditions, our schools and our popular culture. It also involves their habit of parroting clichés and left-wing talking points.

For instance, they repeat every lie they hear about Fox News, but never watch the cable network, for if they did, they would regularly see such left-wing chowderheads as Alan Colmes, Geraldo Rivera, Leslie Marshall, Marc Lamont Hill, Bob Beckel and Juan Williams, mouthing off. They would also see all those liberal politicians who insist they want Fox muzzled making regular appearances.

What’s more, when the loons demonize the Tea Party, they expose the fact that they have never attended one of their events or engaged a Tea Party member in civil discourse. Instead, repeating what they’ve read in Newsweek or the New York Times, or heard from such objective and unimpeachable sources as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Charley Rangel or Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, they’ve blithely labeled millions of patriotic, tax-paying Americans “astroturfers,” “homophobes,” “jihadists” and “hostage-taking terrorists.” You know – all the names they refuse to employ when referring to America’s sworn enemies.

Confirming their status as mental eunuchs is the fact that they only get upset with Barack Obama when he doesn’t raise taxes, shut down Gitmo or join the ranks of the union thugs in Madison, Wisconsin, not when he adds Libya to our war zones, extends the Patriot Act or does any of the other things that led them to denounce George Bush as a Nazi.

Another thing that makes it so difficult to stomach liberals is the way they happily slander anyone their overlords have declared enemies of Obama’s progressive policies, even when those policies are destroying their very lives and the lives of future generations.

So it is that they will denounce, say, pharmaceutical companies, whose products are the main reason that life expectancy has increased in America, but ballyhoo unions, which have done so much to destroy our industries, our schools and our economy.

In order to show their displeasure over oil and coal producers, they are compelled to praise windmills and solar power, which are incapable of supplying a modern industrial nation’s energy needs, except in what passes for Al Gore’s brain. We might just as well place our faith in finding a genie who will grant us unlimited wishes.

Yet another thing that makes it so difficult to take liberals seriously is that whereas they have no problem showing their contempt for conservatives, Israel, religious observance and the folks in what they casually dismiss as “flyover country,” which consists of everything west of the Hudson, except for Illinois and those states butting up against the Pacific, they won’t permit a discouraging word to be uttered about Muslims, illegal aliens, Palestinians, lifelong welfare recipients, abortionists or homosexuals.

Speaking of Hollywood’s favorite minority, homosexuals not only insist on being called gays, but take umbrage at anyone who suggests that same-sex marriage is like one of those bad jokes that, for no apparent reason, occasionally goes viral on the internet. But the fact remains that their contemptuous term for heterosexuals is “breeders.”

But I guess in liberal circles, we can’t really expect that “heterophobe” will ever catch on in a big way.