I often find myself wondering what Rip Van Winkle would make of America if he suddenly awoke from an especially long snooze. I hardly know what to make of it and I’ve been wide awake all along.

For instance, in recent weeks, we have seen an assistant high school football coach, Joe Kennedy of Bremerton (WA) High School, suspended, albeit with pay, for having the audacity of kneeling on the field after a game and praying. I don’t know the nature of his prayers, but since it was after the game ended, I imagine he was either giving thanks that nobody was injured or perhaps that they’d won.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, running back Pedro Banda of Dysart High was suspended for pointing to the sky after scoring a touchdown. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and he was reinstated before he was forced to miss a championship game.

But what would Mr. Van Winkle have thought of a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles that punished those who acknowledged the existence of God? For that matter, what would the Founding Fathers, who set out to create a secular nation, but one that openly credited the Creator in all its important documents, think of those who intentionally misread their carefully crafted words?

I dare say that if Thomas Jefferson had realized that his words in a letter sent to a Baptist church mentioning a separation of church and state was going to be passed off by liberals and atheists as being a part of the Constitution, he would have torn it up. All he was trying to do was to assure the Baptist minority that they wouldn’t be subjugated, and that the Constitution meant exactly what it said.

What Jefferson and his colleagues intended to be in the Constitution is there for the reading: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” and then goes on to mention freedom of speech, the press, and the rights of the people to assemble peaceably and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Nothing could make their position any clearer than those 16 words. There is no mention of prohibiting Christmas trees or crèches from in front of city hall or banning the 10 Commandments from courtroom walls or preventing anyone from pledging allegiance to the flag or even thanking God after scoring a touchdown, sinking a basket or hitting a home run.

All of that nonsense is the work of leftist troublemakers like the yahoos who join and support the ACLU. But we have allowed those creeps to be so successful in their propaganda campaign that a great many Americans actually believe that the Constitution does anything beyond prevent Congress from infringing on the religious rights of American citizens.

In the past, we have seen Clinton profit from the dot.com bubble of the 1990s, which saw phony paper profits make “millionaires” of every cluck involved in the technology boom, and then saw George Bush inherit a lousy economy when the inevitable bust occurred in 2000.

But Bush’s troubles were far from over. Thanks to folks like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the left-wing palookas overseeing Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac and a few of the larger banks, who insisted that people with no credit and no collateral should be encouraged to buy homes they couldn’t afford, Bush was rear-ended when the real estate market went south.

Now that Barack Obama and his cohorts at the Federal Reserve keep printing money and continue to maintain interest rates at zero, the Stock Market is booming. But when 40% of Americans are removed for one reason or another from the employment rolls and wages are stagnant, you can see what a lousy barometer the Stock Market is when it comes to gauging America’s financial health.

Whoever it is that follows Obama into the White House is going to suffer the consequences. Even if it’s Trump, who promises on an hourly basis to restore the economy, once the interest rates begin to climb, proof that the economy is on the upswing, the Stock Market will have to readjust and it won’t be pretty. What’s more, the national debt is hovering around $19 trillion, but that’s because the interest rate is almost non-existent. Once the adjustment takes place, the debt will rise accordingly. And if the person in the Oval Office is a Republican, you can bet he will be blamed for the debt soaring trillions of dollars overnight even if he hasn’t spent a dime.

To give you an idea of what a terrible dilemma faces America, back in the spring of 2000, I happened to be having lunch with an old friend from UCLA days, Howard Berman, a nice guy who had unfortunately become a left-wing congressman from California in the meantime.

Because the dot.com economy was obviously on the verge of collapse, I asked him if he preferred to see Al Gore or George Bush elected in November. He thought long and hard about it. He finally said it’s always better for a Democrat in Congress if there’s a Democrat in the White House, but that it was a close call because he knew there would be hell to pay when the collapse came, no matter who or what had caused it.

In conclusion, I’d like to share an email I recently received that neatly sums up the madness Rip Van Winkle would be greeted with if he happened to wake up tomorrow morning. It was a picture of my late friend Rod Serling standing, cigarette in hand, facing the camera and saying:: “Imagine if you will a world in which the police are the enemy, the IRS is used to silence opposition, patriots are called terrorists, terrorism is called "workplace violence,” and the Democrats’ leading candidates are an elderly socialist and an old lady under investigation by the FBI.“

Yes, Mr. Van Winkle, you, too, have belatedly entered the Twilight Zone.