In one of her classic comedy bits, Lucille Ball, as Lucy Ricardo, once got a job working on the conveyor belt packing chocolates. Every few seconds, the belt would speed up and she started packing the chocolates in a panic. Some went into boxes, others went into her mouth and still others went down the front of her dress.

There are times I feel like poor, bedraggled Lucy. The news just keeps getting worse and worse and it keeps coming our way faster and faster, and none of it tastes anything like chocolate.

For instance, people call Obama a dictator, and with good reason. After all, he keeps trampling on the Constitution and treating the House as if it were more like a motel. And with a disregard even for the optics, he employs the IRS and the EPA as his personal bully boys, using them to punish conservative groups and those companies whose owners have neglected to contribute to his political campaigns.

But he is a dictator unlike all others. Whereas Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez and Putin, all wanted to make their countries stronger, this schmuck has done his best to weaken America by destroying our economy, mucking up our health care system and dividing us along racial, class and gender, lines.

And lest we didn’t get the message, he’s not only made us the laughingstock of the world by constantly drawing red lines in invisible ink, but he appointed as his Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, a knucklehead who had a truly undistinguished career in the Senate, marked only by contempt for Israel, and a bias against the military that is nearly the equal of Obama’s. So nobody should be too surprised that Hagel is leading the charge to cut the Army back to its pre-World War II numbers. But, then, who wants to squander tax dollars to finance a robust military when Russia, Iran, China, Syria, Yemen and North Korea, have all shown themselves to have only our best interests at heart?

Domestically, we could be making major advances if only companies stopped demanding or even requesting that their potential employees come armed with college degrees.

For one thing, colleges no longer help teach their young charges how to think. In fact, the opposite is true. Unless the students are prepared to regurgitate the nonsense fed them by socialist pinheads, they run the risk of not even graduating.

For another thing, most jobs can be mastered in a matter of months, if not weeks.

For a third thing, outstanding student loans now total $1.2 trillion, and, frankly, there aren’t that many outstanding students. Why do people who are going to be nursery school or grammar school teachers, social workers or, in fact, any liberal arts major, need to spend four or five years in college?

For that matter, the first four years of college are merely a way to separate parents from their hard-earned savings. Those who wish to become scientists, doctors, dentists, architects or engineers, should go directly from high school to high tech trade schools, saving themselves a lot of time and money.

I say if a person can learn to fly a military jet in a matter of months, a human being should certainly be able to learn how to be an accountant or an insurance agent in less than a year. And if a person intends to become, God forbid, a politician or go to work for the State Department, I would think he or she could master lying, cheating and stealing, without wasting three years in law school.

Finally, I read a study that confirmed something I’ve been saying for years; namely, that older people start forgetting things not because their brains are rotting away, but because they’re jam-packed with so much stuff.

It’s like moving into a house with an attic. Early on, everything is stored neatly and is easily accessible. But over the years, as the family begins tossing old clothes, photo albums, board games and furniture, up there, things start getting messy. For all their good intentions, old magazines start getting mixed up with picnic hampers and Nehru jackets. Neatness becomes clutter, clutter morphs into chaos. So good luck when you actually need to find something. Eventually, assuming you’re not one of those unfortunates plagued with dementia, you will come up with the long-discarded item – or the misplaced word – you’re searching for, but it might take a while.

Democrats, of course, don’t have the same problem. Their attics tend to remain as pristine as the day they moved in, completely empty, except, perhaps, for a few old Jimmy Carter bumper stickers, a stolen copy of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and a lot of spider webs.