When Al Gore likened global warming deniers, otherwise known as everyone who isn’t receiving government grants or getting filthy rich off the biggest hoax since the Piltdown Man, as latter-day racists, I found myself wondering if he had his father, the late Al Gore, Sr., in mind as an example of an old-fashioned racist. His dad, in case it’s slipped your mind, was one of 21 Senate Democrats who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Regarding civil rights, I just discovered the other day that Anthony Johnson, who had started out like many poor people in the 17th century as an indentured servant, became, after working off his contract, the first official slave owner in America. Ironically, Mr. Johnson, who had been born in Angola, was a black man.

I refuse to believe that I am the only person who’s noticed that just about every time that Obama begins a sentence with “I want to be perfectly clear…” what follows will be self-serving baloney in which clarity, along with honesty, will be totally absent.

Although I am convinced that left-wingers are among the oddest creatures on earth, they don’t completely monopolize the roster when it comes to the world of the bizarre. For instance, who was it who first gazed at a lobster, an oyster or a crab, and said, “Yum, I’m pretty doggone sure that’ll be tasty”?

And what made some Japanese entrepreneur who was trying to come up with a business venture conclude, “I bet that if I carve up some beetles, shark fins or rhino horns, I’ll make a pile selling the stuff as aphrodisiacs.”

Speaking of animals, over the past few weeks, at least a dozen people have passed along a message that’s gone viral on the Internet. It starts out by giving a few examples of collective nouns, such as a herd of cows, a flock of chickens and a school of fish. It concludes with baboons, referring to them as the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious and least intelligent of primates, before letting us know that the proper collective noun for a group of them is a Congress.

It almost sounded too good to be true, so I checked my dictionary, and it turns out it’s not true. But it should be. The fact is, there are any number of terms that are equally appropriate for animals, insects and the lunkheads who inhabit Capitol Hill.

For instance, some that I’ve come across are a coven of curs, a seething of eels, a business of ferrets, a plague of locusts, a scourge of mosquitoes, a passel of pigs, a mischief of mice, a wake of buzzards, an intrusion of cockroaches, a cackle of hyenas, a nest of vipers, a gang of turkeys, a creep of tortoises, a slither of snakes, a committee of vultures, a confusion of weasels, a surfeit of skunks, a swarm of rats, a stench of swine and even a parliament of crows.

As for the more odious members of the media, I think a pandemonium of parrots fits them like a glove.

When Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, Schumer and Barney Frank, blame the wretched economy on Tea Party patriots, I’m reminded that when people undergo amputations, they often experience unbearable pain in what are known as phantom limbs. I’ve often wondered if liberals suffer similar agony in their phantom brains.

Finally, let’s see a show of hands: How many of you got really excited when you heard that Obama was facing deportation to Kenya until you found out they were talking about Barack’s uncle, Onyango?