The emasculation of the U.S. military began, I believe, during the first Gulf War, and had nothing to do with the red carpet that was eventually rolled out for women and homosexuals. I still remember how shocked I was that there was such a to-do over the fact that our troops had to deal with their chocolate bars melting in the desert heat. I kept hearing that something, by God, had to be done about it.

I would never suggest that our soldiers should be regarded as cannon fodder, but the uproar over candy bars made it sound as if they were a troop of Brownies.

Things have only gotten worse under Obama’s watch with his pledge that our warriors will never get any closer to the battlefield than 20,000 feet above it.

I have always supported a robust military budget, but if soldiers are no longer going to be required to get their boots dirty, but continue to receive salaries, pensions and free medical care for decades under a properly managed Veterans Administration, it strikes me as a colossal waste of our tax dollars. We can just have our Secretary of State give our enemies a good stern talking-to.

We used to have military mottoes like “A Few Good Men,” “Semper Fi” and “Be the Best You Can Be,” but now the all-inclusive one seems to be “No Boots on the Ground.”

It isn’t just that liberals are always wrong on the issues, either; they’re equally besotted when it comes to their heroes. During the 30s and 40s, the intelligentsia never stopped singing the praises of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet butcher who had even more blood on his hands than Hitler. Pinheads like Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and half of the people on salary at the Hollywood studios would often refer to him as “Uncle Joe,” as did FDR and most of his left-wing advisors.

In later years, American liberals showed their affinity with murderous vermin by adopting the likes of Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and, of course, the Palestinians who elected Hamas, the terrorist organization sworn to annihilate the Israelis, to lead them.

It was no longer surprising that during his recent address to the U.N., Obama took a moment to praise Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, the Muslim cleric who has called for the killing of Jews and American soldiers. The question no longer is whether Obama is a Muslim or merely has a soft spot in his heart and his head for Islam, but whether he is a Muslim or a Martian still suffering from jet lag.

One can imagine Obama being the Commander-in-Chief during World War II and announcing, “Yes, we are at war with Adolf Hitler and his savage war machine. But we are not – let me repeat – not at war with Nazism, which is a religion of peace. And we will definitely not have any boots on the ground in Europe.”

As for those European nations currently unwilling to take up arms either against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the Islamics in the Middle East, I suggest they heed the words of concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the oppressed. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Or as Winston Churchill once said, “An appeaser is one who feeds an alligator in the hope it will eat him last.”

One can only hope that the civilized world will wake up sooner rather than later, and conclude that a united front is required to hasten the transformation of ISIS into WasWas.

Closer to home, we have our own problems. The 9th Circuit Court ruled that Judge Margaret McKeown was correct in ruling that the administrators at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, CA, were within their rights to send students home for wearing American flag t-shirts because they might have offended the Hispanic kids celebrating Cinco de Mayo, and it might have led to violence on school grounds.

A more appropriate ruling would have sent the Hispanic kids back to Mexico, where they might be astonished to discover that Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day, but merely marks a Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. On the other hand, why would anyone think they’d know any more about Mexico’s history than they do about America’s, especially when their school principal and the knuckleheads on the 9th Circuit Court aren’t even on speaking terms with the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech?

It recently occurred to me that Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown are both liberals. The proof is that she’s mean enough to keep pulling the football away right after promising not to and just before doing it for the thousandth time, and he’s so dumb he keeps allowing her to get away with it, thus establishing that like every liberal who has ever argued that the federal government should control the economy, education, energy, the environment and health care, he is simply incapable of learning from history.

In other words, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Lucy has a copy of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” on her book shelf and Charlie has a poster of Che Guevara on his wall.