I was busy all day so I didn’t get to watch the two GOP debates from South Carolina until late at night. As a result, I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 3 a.m. That’s how seriously I take my responsibility to those of you who are already so sick and tired of the primaries that you have literally tuned out.

Overall, I thought that the early debate, the one that consisted of Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and the ghost of Rand Paul, was the more bearable of the two. For one thing, it was over in an hour. For another thing, none of the debaters carried on as if either of the other two was toxic and would be a greater catastrophe, if elected, than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

As for the second debate, Carson, Kasich and Bush, proved once again why they will be mere footnotes when someone eventually gets around to writing a book about the 2016 campaign.

I continue to believe that Trump, Cruz and Rubio, would do themselves and the GOP far more good by following Christie’s lead and concentrating their fire on Obama and Clinton, than by trashing one another.

According to the pundits, the highlight of the second debate came when Trump warded off Cruz’s remark about “New York values” by pointing out how admirably New Yorkers dealt with the tragic events of 9/11, leaving Sen. Cruz speechless, unable to do anything but join the Charleston audience in applauding the courage of New York’s first responders.

What surprised me was that Cruz, who must have expected that Trump was going to say something along those lines, was caught flatfooted. He didn’t even attempt to explain what he meant and what the rest of us recognize to be those particular values.

If I had been standing in Cruz’s shoes, I would have pointed out that it was that belief system that led Manhattanites to decide that Michael Bloomberg — who despises the Second Amendment nearly as much as Obama does — deserved three terms as mayor. What’s more, it was that same mindset that led them to next elect the cop-hating left-winger Bill DeBlasio, who honeymooned in Cuba years before that other cop-hating left-wing dingbat, Barack Obama, provided the Castro brothers with diplomatic legitimacy.

Speaking of Obama, who has vowed to shut down Gitmo before leaving office, he has already used his dictatorial powers to evict more than a dozen of the worst terrorists since the first of the year. He continues to claim that his motivation derives from the fact that ISIS uses the installation as a recruiting tool, although there is no such evidence.

The truth is that the actual recruiting tool is Obama, himself, who refuses to unleash the U.S. military on the ragheads riding around in old trucks, thus making them look all-powerful in the eyes of impressionable young sadists here and in Europe.

When you consider Obama’s policy from a certain perspective, it’s as if he has decided to prevent the jihadists from using Gitmo as a recruitment tool by saying: “Save yourself the trouble, fellows. Leave it to me to release as many as you need to meet your quota.”

I believe that one of the reasons that Obama is so reluctant to call Islamic terrorism by its rightful name is because so many of the sociopaths who self-radicalize are American blacks. And because we live in a society in which we tend to mislabel moral cowardice as “tolerance,” we continue to allow Islamic clerics the freedom to convert prisoners to a cult that justifies killing white people, particularly those wearing military or police uniforms.

Anyone who has ever seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” knows that every time a bell tinkles, an angel gets his wings. Something that isn’t as widely known is that every time a shmuck named Mohammad or Abdul kills someone while screaming “Allah Akbar,” and Obama, Mrs. Clinton or Philadelphia’s Mayor Jim Kenney, denies it has anything to do with Islam, a plain speaker like Donald Trump, who throws political correctness to the wind, picks up another ten thousand votes.

In response to a piece I recently wrote in honor of dogs in general and our own Angel, in particular, a friend named Richard wrote to me, insisting: “If dogs don’t go to Heaven, I want to go where they go.”

I wrote back to say that he can do whatever he likes, but that he might wish to reconsider, inasmuch as our dog generally goes on my neighbor’s front lawn.