The U.S. Senate under the guidance – or, if you prefer, the thumb – of Harry Reid isn’t interested in getting to the bottom of scandals involving the IRS, Benghazi or the Veterans Administration. But half the Senate – 50 members, count ‘em, 50 – decided that the worst problem facing us was that their hometown football team continues to call itself the Washington Redskins.

Even though a poll has shown that 80% of actual Native Americans have no problem with the name, Harry Reid and his coven of chowderheads have decided that something must be done. The very idea that Reid, who refers to Republicans as un-American – and that’s on one of his more civil days – and calls cancer victims liars if they complain about ObamaCare, should set himself up as a moral arbiter and as the last word on decorum is ludicrous at best, stomach-turning at worst.

And the Senate Democrats go along with it, ignoring the fact that if you take the ravings of a nutburger to heart, it’s a lot like giving money to an addict. It’s the one fool-proof way to ensure he’ll never get well.

On the same day that the Senate Democrats proved how compassionate they are, they refused to pass a House bill that would have given Secretary Eric Shenseki the authority to fire members of the VA for malfeasance. The actual reason why was that the Democrats are beholden to the public sector unions for campaign contributions, and would screw military veterans every day of the week and twice on Sunday rather than risk pissing off federal bureaucrats.

But as bad as that was, the reason that Bernie Sanders, who now calls himself an Independent even though he caucuses with the Democrats and proudly admits to being a socialist, gave for postponing the vote was that he needed more time to read the bill. Isn’t it odd that no Democrat asked for time to read the Affordable Care Act, and that ran longer than “Gone With the Wind” and “War and Peace” put together? But, then again, Nancy Pelosi famously pointed out that there’d be plenty of time to read it once it was passed.

Just for the record, the House bill that Sen. Sanders couldn’t digest in one afternoon ran about 500 words, or about half as long as this article.

Speaking of numbers, while nine million American vets have to make do with 267,000 VA employees – not nearly all of whom are medical professionals – 150 Muslim terrorists at Gitmo have 100 doctors and nurses at their beck and call. It begs the question: What sort of people are we that we treat the creeps trying to kill us better than we treat the men and women who risked their lives and lost their limbs trying to defend us?

Recently, I confessed to being sick and tired of having “gate” added to every Washington scandal for no other reason than that Nixon met his Waterloo over the Watergate break-in. But even worse is having “phobic” added as suffixes by those who are perpetually offended.

A phobia, after all, is defined as an unnatural fear. I don’t happen to believe that people who object to either sodomy or to same-sex marriages are suffering from a mental disorder. You may feel one way or another about them, but to suggest that they suffer from an unnatural fear of homosexuals is delusional.

That brings us to those accused of being “Islamaphobes.” Considering that all over the world, the followers of Mohammad are slaughtering innocent people, stoning to death anyone who converts from Islam to Christianity and attempting through Sharia Law to institutionalize the subjugation of women in Europe and even here in America, suggests to any sane human being that there is nothing unwarranted about fearing, as well as despising, these barbarians. The crazy people are those, like George Bush and Barack Obama, who insist Islam is a religion of peace when it is clearly a blood-thirsty cult.

With the midterm elections just around the corner, it’s just about time we began hearing that the GOP needs to have a bigger tent, and not just to accommodate Governor Christie. It was sheer humbug the first time we heard it, and it hasn’t improved with age.

Any political party that can include Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, John McCain, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Scott Brown, Trey Gowdy, John Boehner, the aforementioned Chris Christie and me, is plenty large enough. Some might even say a tad too large.

We’re told incessantly that we have to reach out to black voters, Hispanic voters and young single women, but when the members of these groups continue voting for the scurrilous likes of Barack Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, Elijah Cummings, Joe Garcia, Linda Chavez, and can’t wait to vote for Hillary Clinton, it is a colossal waste of time and resources trying to out-promise and out-bribe the liberals. That’s time and money that can be better spent prodding every registered Republican to vote on Election Day even if (boo-hoo, sniffle, sniffle) their primary favorites fall by the wayside.

John Kerry, who’s generally good for a laugh, out-did himself recently while in Mexico. He told a group of environmental simpletons that, thanks to global warming, temperatures in Europe and Vietnam a day earlier had “been unprecedented, breaking every record that’s ever been seen.” He went on to mention life-threatening temperatures of 30, 32, 33 and even an unimaginable 34 degrees Celsius. What he apparently didn’t know was that those numbers when translated into Fahrenheit are a warm, but not exactly lethal, low to mid 90s.

In the future, Secretary Kerry would be well-advised to channel either his inner Al Gore or his inner Chicken Little, but never both at the same time.