In 1940, when Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote their Oscar-winning ode to Paris, she had recently been invaded by the Nazis. Had the song been written 75 years later, the lyric would have to mention that her streets ran red with blood, and Hammerstein would have to find a rhyme for Islamic butchery.

It wasn’t that long ago that the media expressed its universal contempt for Sony Pictures when the company initially decided not to release “The Interview.” The charge was that Sony was letting Kim Jong-un get the idea he could unilaterally abolish the First Amendment. Even Obama, in spite of his fondness for Hollywood liberals, belatedly piled on, insisting that Sony had made a mistake.

But now it’s the media itself that has decided that punking out is the better part of discretion. Even though twelve French satirists were murdered for using a cartoony depiction of Muhammad in their magazine, none of these stalwart defenders of the First Amendment is daring to publish the newsworthy cartoon.

In the same way, when Muslims killed Danish journalists over similar cartoons in 2005, these same newspapers and magazines censored themselves.

Personally, I don’t condemn the NY Times, CNN, Fox, the AP, Time magazine, the L.A. Times or any of these other media giants for their cowardice, which is at least rational behavior in a world rife with jihadists, but for their hypocrisy, which I find contemptible. Where do they get off shaming Sony for caving to threats?

Worse yet, these media cowards have the gall to pretend they’re motivated by a profound respect for religion. In my opinion, if Islam is a religion, and not a barbaric cult, then so was Nazism; and Charles Manson, Jim Jones and David Koresh, should all be regarded as religious leaders.

Barack Hussein Obama – and what belief system would we normally connect with someone named Barack Hussein Obama? – famously said, “The future doesn’t belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” But that goes without saying. After all, what could any reasonable person find slander-worthy in a Prophet who was known to be a pedophile and who promoted his faith by butchering those who dared question his holiness?

For years, conmen have made fortunes convincing the greedy and gullible that they had come up with a legitimate way to avoid paying income taxes. Well, this is to announce that I have come up with a sure-fire system of my own, but being the kind of guy I am, I’m offering it for free. All you have to do is be black and a prominent left-winger. For instance, when Rep. Charles Rangel, among his other sins, was found to have been a long-standing tax cheat, his House colleagues voted to censure him. After which, they all adjourned to the House dining room to serenade Charley with a few rousing choruses of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

You might say that congressmen get away with all sorts of monkey business, and you’d be right. But consider another black left-winger who doesn’t hold a public office, Al Sharpton. In spite of an unpaid $4.5 million tax bill, he is welcomed with open arms wherever black bigots congregate – be it in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, or the West Wing of the White House.

And for those who insist that military service should be a prerequisite to a career in politics, it should be noted that Rep. Rangel apparently served honorably in the U.S. Army from 1948-1952. It is also true that he once admitted, “I only cared about dead soldiers when they looked like me.” I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the remark sounds very much like something Obama has been heard to say whenever some black thug gets shot.

Because I recently warned everyone off the 16 movies the studios sent me in December looking to garner my vote in the Writers Guild competition, I feel compelled to report that they finally got around to sending me one worth my time, and therefore yours. It’s an English movie, “The Imitation Game,” about Alan Turing, who led the English team of linguists and mathematicians who miraculously cracked Germany’s enigma code during World War II.

Only once in my life did I come up with a great money-making idea. The miracle took place about 35 years ago when I wrote an article suggesting that for those people who wanted a pet, but thought dogs and cats were too much trouble, but were willing, for reasons I couldn’t imagine, to settle for the likes of birds, fish and reptiles, they might consider sharing their home with a rock. I mentioned that they were low upkeep: no messes to clean up, no newspapers that needed changing and absolutely zero food costs.

When I say it was a great money-making idea, I don’t mean that it made me any money. No way. It took some other guy to see the commercial potential of the goofy notion and to make millions marketing Pet Rocks.

Well, apparently, every 35 years, I come up with these moneymakers. The other morning, I went out to my car, turned the key and was greeted with silence. My battery was kaput. When I had driven the car the previous night, everything was hunky-dory and it wasn’t as if I had left the lights on.

Its time had come, as it must to all of us, and it had simply moved on to battery heaven. Anyway, what I’d like to know is why, if the battery in my smoke alarm can beep a polite warning when it’s on the verge of passing away, my car battery can’t do the same.

Believe me, if I knew how to invent things, I would get right on it. But I can’t. So I am offering this to the world free of charge, which, come to think of it, was the problem with my damn battery.