I am not a warmonger, but isn’t Vladimir Putin just begging for a major slap-down? He has said that the worst event of the 20th century was the breakup of the Soviet Union, and he has done everything in his power to restore it to its former, let us say, gory.

He longs for the empire that had half of Europe under its heel and he yearns to be another Stalin, who was every bit a match for Hitler when it came to spilling human blood.

Putin invades Ukraine, and Barack Obama says “There will be costs.” Heck, Putin knows that there will be costs. It’s not cheap, after all, to invade another country. But it is clearly a price he is willing to pay, knowing full well that neither Obama nor any of the European pipsqueaks is likely to challenge him. But, then, neither are the Ukrainians. He sent a force of 2,000 Russian soldiers in to take control of two Ukrainian airports and the local radio and TV stations, and nobody even booed them.

Of course, Putin will say that Crimea, a district in the southern part of Ukraine, is connected historically and culturally to Russia, just as Hitler made a similar claim about the Sudetenland just before he annexed Czechoslovakia.

These events raise some important questions. For instance, what is the point of NATO or, for that matter, the U.S. military? Oh, I figure if Luxembourg invaded San Marino, it’s possible Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Greece, might take action, especially if they could then divide Luxembourg among themselves like a Christmas turkey. As for the U.S., so long as the sissy-in-chief remains in the Oval Office, I’d say there’s nothing to prevent Canada from invading us and planting the maple leaf on Capitol Hill.

I know I keep hearing that Americans are weary of war. I happen to believe we are weary of waging wars we have no intention of winning. So long as the only reason we have a nuclear arsenal is so that, depending on who the president happens to be, we can either brag about it or apologize for it, it’s a needless expense.

President Prelutsky would definitely use the bomb. As I see it, if Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, wound up being large craters, it could only be an improvement, both politically and aesthetically.

But Prelutsky would also have a foreign policy that included political assassinations. There is no reason to go to war and needlessly lose tens of thousands of lives when it is perfectly feasible to achieve détente by assassinating Putin, Assad, Kim Jung-un and the Ayatollah Khamenei. The only reason that we have been taught to reject such a notion is because national leaders are out to save their own bacon. After all, murders take place every minute of every day. The tragedy is that they are senseless and the victims are nearly always innocent and undeserving of such a cruel fate. But when it comes to bloodthirsty dictators, they are neither innocent nor undeserving. They are in fact asking for it, and to me it seems a shame not to give them what they have coming.

Moving on, if there is anything good to be said for the Affordable Care Act, it provides absolute proof that you can’t write and pass a 2,600 page bill and not create a monster of Frankenstinian proportions.

Brevity is an ideal rarely achieved. That is especially the case when it comes to federal legislation. If I were running things, I would make it a law that if a bill can’t be written in five pages or less, it is DOA and can’t even be brought to the floor for a vote. See, that only took 25 words.

I would also make it the law of the land that any bill passed by Congress and signed by the President would exempt neither them nor members of their staffs or families. That, alone, would prevent any number of two, three or four page bills from even seeing the light of day.

In case you haven’t noticed, judges are being even goonier than usual lately. In Montana, Judge G. Todd Baugh decided that a 47-year-old teacher should get off with a 30-day sentence for raping one of his students, a 14-year-old girl, because it struck the judge that she was old beyond her years, which is another way of saying she was asking for it.

Not to be outdone, a three member federal court of appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that the school administrators at Live Oaks High, in Morgan Hill, CA, were acting lawfully when they insisted that a group of students who were wearing the American flag on their t-shirts had to turn their shirts inside out so as not to offend Hispanic students on Cinco de Mayo, the 1st Amendment be damned!

Apparently, liberal judges and school principals feel they are being courageous when they come down on patriotic displays in this fashion, but most of us understand that their displays of racial tolerance are actually ill-disguised acts of abject cowardice.

The fact is, the pimps that run Live Oaks were simply terrified that the Hispanic students would get violent, and God forbid that Hispanic students be suspended or even be lectured about what it means to be an American. As a public service, I, personally, would have provided the kids with maps showing them just how close the Mexican border is and the best route to take getting there.

Which reminds me, Oscar Wilde once observed: “In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience.”

The real shame is that ever since the 60s, when America’s youth proclaimed themselves the best, most decent, brightest and bravest, generation the world had ever seen, many older people, particularly liberals, have believed it.

Proof of the pudding can be seen in the White House, where the inevitable result of that sort of narcissistic self-delusion sits, twiddling his humongous thumbs while America sinks to economic, social and military defense, levels previously unknown and the rest of the world goes up in flames.