These days, you can hardly look at our institutions or the electorate and not wonder how or if America will survive. Even our so-called houses of worship are not above suspicion. Whether it’s mosques, where far too often our vilest enemies meet to plot our deaths and America’s downfall; black churches, where hatred of whites is often passed off as gospel by reverends cut in the style of Jeremiah Wright; or Presbyterian churches, where its ministers are so preoccupied with attacking Israel, they often ignore Christ altogether and overlook the fact that he was a Jew.

Our schools also serve as incubators of ignoramuses who are likely to regard global warming and second-hand smoke as greater dangers than Islam and the Democratic Party, and far more likely to regard Barack Obama as a finer president and a greater man than George Washington.

Or as mathematician Martin Gardner writes, “Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads, ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals, the flotsam and jetsam of historical events. The men who radically altered history, the great creative scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.”

He might have mentioned the painters, sculptors, writers and composers, whose work manages to survive in spite of all the mischief inflicted by the others on his list. Proof of his contention is that year after year, when Americans are asked to name the ten people they most admire, the list contains nine people holding elective office and a tenth, some pinhead like Hillary Clinton, who hopes to in the near-future.

Speaking of harridans, I just recently discovered that a foundation subsidized by John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, helps support a Pittsburgh restaurant named Conflict Kitchen. The eatery boasts that it only serves food native to countries that oppose the U.S. Further proof that their hearts are in the wrong place is that they serve their sandwiches in propaganda wrappers denouncing Israel.

The foundation has also funneled millions of dollars to radical left-wing environmental groups.

I think we can all agree that however we may have felt about George Bush’s eight years in office, we owe him a huge debt of gratitude for keeping Al Gore and the Kerrys out of the White House.

The homage to the late Ben Bradlee continues unabated. Much has been made about his objectivity as managing editor of the Washington Post, his insistence that truth is the only thing that matters when you’re running a newspaper. And yet the man behind the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal, allowed himself to be seduced by John Kennedy. Although Bradlee ran more than 200 stories about Watergate, he never ran even one about Kennedy’s non-stop womanizing, not even when Kennedy was sharing the sexual favors of a Mafia don’s moll.

The same people would have us believe that in spite of going sailing with Kennedy every chance he had, Walter Cronkite was also a great objective newsman. Although his defenders referred to him as avuncular, he was really just pompous and boring. But his fans called him Uncle Walter. Well, it so happens that Uncle Walter’s nightly lies about Vietnam eventually led to our defeat in a war which, as we later learned, the North Vietnamese were certain they’d lost.

The blood of the millions of Cambodians murdered by the Communists belongs on Cronkite’s hands every bit as much as it does on Jane Fonda’s.

Obama’s current Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, is certainly easier to stomach than his predecessor, the smug Jay Carney, but he is equally fatuous. Recently, he responded to a question from Fox’s Ed Henry regarding the New York doctor who returned from West Africa and, instead of self-quarantining himself, went gallivanting all over the place, thusly: “He was tested before he got on a plane over there and again after he landed at JFK, and he was okay.”

Was he totally unaware of the fact that he had just proven that Obama’s refusal to ban flights from the Ebola hot zone was insane?

Something about the disease that has me puzzled, though, is that we are told that Ebola can only be transmitted by someone displaying the symptoms. But, surely, one’s temperature doesn’t instantly go from 98.6 to 101.5. So are we really supposed to believe that everything is hunky dory when it’s 101.3 or 101.4?

Speaking of which, my friend Merrill Heatter summed up the incident with a fictitious headline: “Ebola-Infected Doctor without Borders Returns to Country without Borders.”

With every new election, I hear from many of my fellow Republicans, fearful that the Democrats will win as a result of cheating. I think that is a legitimate concern and certainly explains why those on the Left are so vehemently opposed to the use of Photo IDS. After all, the only reason that Al Franken won his Senate race in 2008 was because boxes of Minnesota ballots kept showing up in car trunks, attics, cellars, bank vaults and Franken’s sock drawer.

Wouldn’t you think that if the Democrats actually believed that requiring Photo IDS in order to vote was nothing more than a way to disenfranchise blacks and poor people, Obama would occasionally run one of his $35,000-a-plate fundraisers as a means to provide them?

But there are other ways for Republicans to lose elections they would otherwise win. One of which is for conservative purists to stay home on Election Day if their favorites didn’t win the primary, insisting there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Really? No difference between George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama? Is America really the same place in 2014 that it was in 2008?

Another way that the GOP can lose is when the Libertarian loons manage to get one of their own on a ballot, someone who has no chance of winning an election, and whose sole purpose, it seems, is to suck votes away from the Republican. I’m almost convinced the party was invented by James Carville and financed by Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Finally, it’s time for another Prelutsky Poll. The question is a simple one: Do you regard yourself as a Republican or a Tea Partier? In other words, is the (R) after the candidate’s name enough to get your vote or does he or she also have to have been vetted by someone such as Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh?

Please keep your response as pithy as possible. Remember, I’m very old and my time is therefore limited.