When I was a child, people used to boast that in America anybody could grow up to be president. At the time, I thought they were kidding. Now I know better.

It is equally apparent these days that absolutely anyone can grow up to be the majority leader of the Senate, the speaker of the House and the attorney general of the United States. And now that we all see how easy it is and how very little in the way of intelligence, integrity or even personal hygiene, for all I know, is required, it’s no wonder that parents are no longer boasting.

A friend sent me an email, passing along an observation he had come across: “The problem with America is stupidity. I’m not saying there should be capital punishment for stupidity, but why don’t we just take the warning labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?”

If only the solution were that simple. But it’s not stupidity, alone, that’s destroying America. God knows it doesn’t help, but there’s also the matter of left-wing lies that are trumpeted in the media and the classrooms, not to mention the blatant hypocrisy and fraud perpetrated by our elected representatives.

Harry Reid buys off a Louisiana senator with a $300 million bribe and her Nebraska colleague with a deal that will force the other 49 states to subsidize Nebraska’s Medicaid program until Hell freezes over. Then Reid, who looks like Scrooge but acts like Santa when there are votes to be bought, announces that it’s only business as usual in the U.S. Senate.

I wonder if the other 57 Democrats are kicking themselves for not cutting better deals. After all, it’s obvious that they’re all whores. The only difference is that Landrieu and Nelson got a bigger payoff for selling their wares. When you get right down to it, the U.S. Senate is nothing more than a meat market.

Somebody recently asked me if I thought we would ever put a stop to illegal aliens sneaking into our country. At this late date, I replied, does it even matter? Once the politicians of both parties decided it was more important to secure their seats than our borders, and compounded their sins by promoting the idiotic notion of dual-citizenship, the entire idea of American sovereignty became a bad joke. Heck, we couldn’t even get those morons in Washington to declare English our official language. Voting them out of office isn’t nearly punishment enough. They’re a pack of traitors and they should be horsewhipped for what they’ve done to our nation.

The fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab could actually get on a plane and fly to Detroit makes it perfectly clear that American citizens are the only people on earth for whom flying is now a major pain in the butt. My wife has to take off her shoes, her jacket and her barrettes before they’ll allow her to get within a mile of an airliner. In my case, they’re worried sick that I, who never even took high school chemistry, will somehow be able to turn my toothpaste and mouthwash into a lethal compound. But a 23-year-old Nigerian who had known ties to Islamic terrorists has carte blanche to carry aboard an incendiary device in his pants pocket.

These days, thanks to political correctness gone amok, Osama bin Laden, could probably get on a plane even if he, like Wile E. Coyote, were carting around one of those boxes overflowing with sticks of dynamite from the AcmeCompany.

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t even let a guy carrying around a name like Umar Farouk Addulmutallab get on an airplane.

Speaking of flying, I couldn’t believe it when I heard that while young Umar was being tackled in Detroit, the Obamas were vacationing in Hawaii. It seemed like he’d just been in Denmark the day before, whining about carbon footprints and, in spite of his teeth chattering like castanets, global warming.

So, just for the heck of it, I started adding up his recent mileage. In order to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, he flew 3,881 miles from Washington to Oslo. From Oslo to Copenhagen, where he was verbally bitch-slapped by his erstwhile amigo, Hugo Chavez, was a short hop of 300 miles. Then Copenhagen to Washington was 3,979 miles. Washington to Honolulu is 4,835 miles, making it a round trip of 9,670 miles. That adds up to 17,830 miles in just a matter of weeks.

Merely for purposes of comparison, the distance from Washington, D.C., to Crawford, Texas, is just 1,240 miles, and George W. Bush never claimed to be a disciple of Al Gore. And for what it’s worth, Camp David, which I’ve heard is a really nice vacation spot, is a short 70-mile helicopter ride from the White House lawn.

At the rate Obama’s going, he’ll soon have piled up enough frequent flyer miles to go to the moon.

And I, for one, say the sooner, the better.