When Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, after referring to the blood of the fallen soldiers having consecrated the ground of that Pennsylvania pasture, he concluded his brief remarks by saying that because of their ultimate sacrifice, “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that the government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

What Lincoln could not foresee was that a century and a half later, we the people would elect and then re-elect a despot who would usurp the role of Congress simply because it refused to do his bidding and would make a practice of ignoring all the constitutional limits on the executive branch with such regularity that even those who voted for him less than two years ago have begun to experience buyer’s remorse. A recent poll has disclosed that if they could do it all over again, a sizable number of those who gave him another four years in 2012 now wish they had voted for Mitt Romney.

I happen to be one of those people who voted for Romney. I still believe he would have been a great president, but he wasn’t a great candidate. But it wasn’t entirely his fault. For one thing, the Democrats knew that he would eventually beat out Santorum and Gingrich for the nomination, and therefore spent months attacking him and his connection to Bain Capital while he was kept busy beating out Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum.

Once he was a candidate, he was stuck debating Obama in what was never a fair fight because the referee – a liberal moderator named Candy Crowley – kept working Romney over with a blackjack.

He also suffered from either not possessing or not having the opportunity to display a sense of humor. His writers didn’t help. Even after running for the nomination in 2008 and running for president in 2012, the only two things anyone ever remembers his saying was that illegal aliens should self-deport and that 47% of the people would never vote for him. Compare that to the number of lines we continue attributing to Ronald Reagan.

Speaking of humor, a reader sent me the following definition: A Hillionaire is a woman who is worth millions of dollars, but claims to be dead broke.

I would like to know who it is that hires those who speak for the State Department. You only have to look and listen to Jan Psaki and Marie Harf, two supercilious young women who come off like a pair of teenage brats, address the press corps to suspect it was Barack Obama himself who signed them up. He has, after all, made a practice of surrounding himself with such obnoxious louts as Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius, Lois Lerner, Jay Carney, Valerie Jarrett, Van Jones and John Koskinen. I swear, if you could convert arrogance into electricity, you could wire up those weasels and make America energy-independent for the next century.

Because I believe that a progressive income tax is socialistic and therefore unfair, I would like to see it replaced. Some favor a Flat Tax, some a Fair Tax. I am open to persuasion, but what I do know is that the current system is far too cumbersome and is at its core un-American.

Liberals are always calling for the rich to pay their fair share. But what’s fair about their having to pay at a higher rate than other people? If a person makes a million dollars a year and pays, say, 10%, he will pay the taxman $100,000. Someone earning $50,000 will have to cough up $5,000, and someone making $20,000 will owe $2,000. But why should the rich guy have to pay at, say, a 20% rate? What’s fair about that? Besides, he’s already paying much more in sales taxes because he buys more expensive stuff than the rest of us.

I don’t often quote members of the entertainment industry because they are generally pinheads and never say anything bright or amusing unless someone else is writing their dialogue. But the star of my favorite TV series, “Doc Martin,” a rather odd-looking Englishman named Martin Clunes, had the wit and candor to describe himself thus: “Jug ears and child-bearing lips.”

Finally, I would like to speak up on behalf of those people among us who are generally described as mentally-challenged. I used to live next door to a home that housed half-a-dozen young men whose collective IQ probably didn’t top 450, but they were unfailingly polite, kind and, to the extent of their ability, helpful neighbors.

Where I now live, I often see vans conveying similarly disabled young men and women to and fro between their homes and their jobs. They often wave when they see me walking my dog Angel and seem delighted when I wave back.

What got me to thinking about them was seeing a segment on TV about the government finally deciding to only buy American flags made in America, and not in China or Indonesia. One of the American workers they showed was just such a woman. But when she was asked how she felt about sewing the flags, she smiled proudly and said, “It makes me feel just like Betsy Ross.”

I can’t help wondering how many college students, who are drowning in debt so that left-wing professors can live high off the hog, have ever even heard of Betsy Ross.