Although I am by nature an optimist, I must admit that even I have begun to suspect that our nation’s best years, like my own, are behind us.

As some of you will recall, just prior to the 2012 presidential election, I wrote that I was confident America could survive another four years of Obama, but I wasn’t at all certain it could survive an electorate that would provide him with four more years. I still feel that way, and the thought that Hillary (“What difference does it make?”) Clinton could be next in line, chills my bones and curdles my blood.

Speaking of Mrs. Clinton reminds me that young single women constitute her largest fan base. In a way, I suppose that makes sense. After all, they put great store in cracking through glass ceilings, and their favorite icon has made a practice, verging on an art form, of pretending she’s spent her life doing that very thing. In point of fact, she hasn’t cracked a single one. She wasn’t the first female lawyer, the first female senator or even the first female secretary of state. And she certainly isn’t the first woman who ever owed her entire political career to having been the wife or daughter of a successful male politician.

In a way, her utter dependence on Bill Clinton might seem as if it would be problematic for those impressionable young women. But not once you realize that while they always pretend to be strong and independent, they invariably give the game away by voting for any sugar daddy Democrat who promises to take care of them, going so far as to promise to provide the young ladies, paradoxically, with both birth control pills and abortions on demand.

Although the liberal press did cartwheels over the Pope’s recent visit to the Holy Land, where he went out of his way to display an unseemly bias in favor of those who vow to exterminate Israelis, a more honest view of the event was provided by the cartoonist for Canada’s Calgary Herald: The cartoon showed Pope Francis indicating Israel’s security fence and asking Bibi Netanyahu: “Why this wall in Israel?” To which, the Prime Minister responds: “Why this bulletproof glass in the Popemobile?”

Anybody who thinks that Shinseki’s resignation will lead to a bright new day for the VA has taken leave of his senses. The annual budget for the department is $150 billion. If they were serious about improving things for veterans, they would shut down the VA and use that money in the form of vouchers, enabling the vets to seek health care on their own. The problem is that the Democrats are worried that such a radical notion might catch on with the general public, and that would spell the end of ObamaCare.

I pitied the West Point cadets having to shake Obama’s hand before being allowed to collect their diplomas. They had to settle for showing their contempt by maintaining silence during his commencement address, even though he paused at all the usual places where blacks, single women and college students, can invariably be trusted, like Pavlov’s dogs, to respond to the obvious cues with thundering ovations.

Proving that even a has-been has a responsibility to maintain her status as a Hollywood pinhead, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that being attacked on the Internet is just as hard on a person as serving in a war zone. She is also the Oscar-winning moron who said how much more difficult it is to be an actress and a mom than to be a mother working in an office. When you read comments like these, you should always be mindful of the fact that celebrities pay P.R. flacks a lot of dough to make them appear to be human beings, and not the alien life forms they actually happen to be. And yet, time and again, just like the federal government, all they really prove is that money is not the solution.

In the wake of the carnage by Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista, it was as predictable as a sunrise that the anti-gun nuts would come creeping out of the woodwork to condemn gun ownership in spite of the fact that three of the six murders were committed with a knife. When you consider how reluctant liberals are to think rationally, it makes me wonder if they fear it will give their brains wrinkles.

For instance, someone recently sent me what he called a tale of two cities, in which he compared Chicago to Houston. The things they had more or less in common was population (Chicago’s 2.7 million to Houston’s 2.15 million); median household income ($38,600-$37,000); percentage of blacks (38.9% to 24%); percentage of Hispanics (29.9% to 44%); percentage of Asians (5.5% to 6%); percentage of non-Hispanic whites (28.7% to 26%).

The differences were that Chicago doesn’t have a concealed carry gun law, Houston does. Chicago doesn’t have any gun stores, Houston has 184. In spite of which, Chicago had 1,806 homicides in 2012, Houston had 207.

Another difference is that the average January high temperature in Chicago is 31 degrees, 63 in Houston.

From all of that, you would think the typical liberal would naturally conclude that, whatever else it does, global warming reduces the murder rate.

Finally, speaking of a typical liberal, Barack Obama has been called by some the Antichrist. Maybe, maybe not. But it is certainly fair to call him the Antimoses. Moses, you may recall, spent years leading his people through the desert to the Promised Land. Obama, on the other hand, has spent years leading his people from the Promised Land to the desert.