I recently had the pleasure of addressing the members of the 405/605 Tea Party Patriots. I said the following:

You folks don’t know me and since I’ve never appeared on Fox and never had the opportunity to guest host the Rush Limbaugh Show, you probably have never even heard of me. So by way of introduction, let me say I don’t admire politicians, not even Republican politicians, not even conservative politicians. But I do sympathize with them. At least up to a point.

I assume that some of them — perhaps even many of them — get in the game with the best of intentions. But after a while, they learn the facts of political life and, inevitably, frustration begins to overwhelm them. After that, their only motivation to stick with it are the perks and the fact that it beats working.

I’m reminded of a liberal idealist I knew years ago at UCLA. He believed all the stuff he heard, even back then in the 60s, about racist cops. He decided to join the force and be the exception to the rule. But after working in South Central L.A. for about six months, he was referring to the blacks he encountered on a daily basis as the Mau-Mau.

But, getting back to politics, why would anyone wish to pursue it as a career, unless you had already discovered that the practice of law isn’t nearly as exciting as it appears to be on TV and in the movies?

If you’re sitting there wondering why I sympathize with politicians, there are two main reasons. For one thing, you wind up having to spend your life listening to other politicians drone on. For another, every two, four or six years, you have to go hat-in-hand to beg strangers, who often earn less than you do, to hand over money for no better reason than to help you get or keep your job.

Then, as if that’s not bad enough, every two, four or six years, people who haven’t been paying any attention at all get to decide if you’re out on your ear. Worse yet, down deep, you know that if Kim Kardashian, George Clooney or Lady Gaga, decided to change careers and run against you, you wouldn’t stand a chance.

Moving on, I realize that a lot of people did not support Donald Trump in the primaries. The truth is, he only received 43% of the votes cast, but one should keep in mind that early on, he was competing with a great many contenders who were splitting the vote between them.

For the purpose of full disclosure, I am one of those people who didn’t support Mr. Trump. In the California primary, I voted for Ted Cruz.

But when I saw Cruz supporters and others on opening day of the GOP convention screaming about the rules, looking and sounding a lot like the pinheads who spent months “feeling the Bern,” I found myself wondering how many of those sore losers were more concerned with denying Donald Trump the nomination than with denying Hillary Clinton the presidency.

As I say, I didn’t support Trump, but he beat off the competition fair and square. So I put it to the Never-Trumpers — if people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush and the other 4,879 contenders couldn’t win the majority of delegates, what makes anyone believe they’d have any chance in a general election when, for reasons I still can’t fathom, they actually allow Democrats to vote?

But my disappointment with Republicans doesn’t end there. It also includes people like Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois and Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who all decided to stay home and watch the convention on TV while noshing on sour grapes.

I would also include Fox News pundit George Will, who resigned from the Republican Party once Donald Trump garnered the nomination. There, there, dry your tears. Somehow, I believe the GOP will manage to carry on without George.

Apparently, Mr. Will didn’t consider Trump conservative enough. Heck, I don’t consider Trump conservative enough. But, apparently, George Will thought George Herbert Walker Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney, were all conservative enough to satisfy his pristine palette. Go figure.

The sad fact of the matter is that the last really conservative president we had was Calvin Coolidge. The second most was Ronald Reagan, but let us be honest and admit that his reputation was more conservative than his record.

After all, as our governor, Reagan signed the most liberal abortion bill in America, raised our taxes twice and, as a budget-cutting measure, shut down most of the asylums in the state, releasing thousands of psychotics to the streets, where they remain to this day and where, every two, four or six years, they get to vote for Democrats.

As President, Ronald Reagan didn’t press for an amendment calling for a balanced budget, didn’t shut down a single federal agency or department, but did increase the debt by two trillion dollars — chump change compared to the amount it increased under Bush and Obama, but still nothing to sniff at. Reagan, you may recall, also found the time to sign the amnesty bill, which opened the floodgates to millions of illegal aliens.

I know that Tip O'Neill and his fellow Democrats promised to build a wall, but why would anyone expect the left-wing rabble to keep their word? Apparently, Reagan believed that “trust-but-verify” only applied when it came to dealing with the Russians.

Yet another Republican who disappointed me was George W. Bush. It was bad enough that I had to spend all those years being told that Islam was a religion of peace at the same time that the peaceniks were killing American soldiers, bringing down our skyscrapers and burning and beheading Christians in the Middle East. But I waited in vain for him to say something about Barack Obama — to take him to task for siding with the black mobs against the police, for overstepping the constitutional limits of his authority, for refusing to even name our existential enemy.

For over seven years, I waited for George Bush to defend our nation against the greatest threat, foreign or domestic, that America has faced in over two centuries. But the man remained as quiet as a tomb.

Nothing that Obama said or did moved George Bush to break his respectful silence. But once Donald Trump prevented Jeb Bush’s coronation, that finally was a bridge too far. So, apparently, it was okay for Obama to do everything in his power to dismantle the republic, okay for him to travel to foreign lands and denigrate America’s glorious history and traditions from afar, but apparently stopping a Bush dynasty in its tracks was unforgiveable.

For the record, the only Bushes I ever liked were Barbara and Laura. I even lost whatever remnants of respect I had for G.H.W. Bush once he began showing up joined at the hip to that money-grubbing, sexual-predator, Bill Clinton.

Please understand that I wish a true conservative, someone like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee or Jason Chaffetz, could be elected president. But if a person doesn’t hail from Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, South Carolina and a few other states, they not only couldn’t get elected to the Senate or the House, they’d have a tough time getting elected dog catcher.

Back in 1980 and 1984 when Reagan was being elected, America was still slightly right of center. Today, it is definitely left of center and, with the influx and birth rate of Hispanics and Muslims, it’s getting lefter by the day.

That is why I feel the ulcer forming in my gut whenever I hear well-meaning people say that we conservatives should break away and form our own party.

I suppose that would be a smart thing to do if we only had to worry about defeating the Greens and the Libertarians on Election Day. But, unfortunately, any fracturing of the Republican ranks would only make it that much easier for the morons — whether they call themselves Democrats, Progressives, Socialists or Communists — to prevail.

Frankly, I don’t know what to expect of a Trump administration because he has been on both sides of so many issues, but I am willing — even anxious — to elect him because I know exactly what to expect of a Hillary Clinton administration. After all, I’ve spent the past seven-and-a-half years watching the very terrifying coming attractions.

Hillary Clinton, let us never forget, did her part in formulating Obama’s foreign policy. She pushed the re-set button with Putin, which led to his absorption of Crimea, his invasion of Ukraine and his entry into the Middle East. She helped bring about the deal with Iran that gave them a clear path to a nuclear arsenal and $150 billion to help finance it, knowing full-well that a nuclear Iran would inevitably jeopardize Israel’s existence as well as our own.

Mrs. Clinton allowed four Americans to be massacred in Benghazi and then lied about a video to the American people and the families of the four martyrs after telling Chelsea that it was a planned attack having nothing to do with a video. Then she compounded her sins by calling the parents and siblings of the four dead Americans liars when they told the truth about her.

Even though FBI Director James Comey put his own soul in jeopardy by claiming it hadn’t been Hillary Clinton’s intention to risk state secrets by using a private server, the mere fact that she insisted on using a private server proved that it was always her intention to conceal the corruption of the Clinton Foundation by evading government surveillance.

While Donald Trump was calling on people like Marcus Luttrell, the Navy Seals who survived the Benghazi attack, Rudy Giuliani and Sheriff David Clarke, to speak on his behalf and back up his claim to be the “law and order” candidate, what was Hillary Clinton doing? She was letting the rabble who constitute the Black Lives Matter movement know that she felt their pain and was assuring the NAACP that she agreed with them that the police officers of America, apparently including black police officers, are guilty of “implicit racism.”

If I had the job that Reince Priebus holds down, on the night that Hillary Clinton introduced the mothers of street thugs Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, to the left-wing riffraff convening in Philadelphia, I would have stages a televised event where the mothers of the cops murdered by black assassins, as well as the mothers of the Benghazi Four and the mothers of all the women sexually assaulted and traumatized by Bill Clinton over the years, would have had their own moment in the spotlight.