The ways in which Obama’s eight-year reign hurt America are too numerous to list here, but at the top or near the top of the list would be the way he turned blacks and whites against each other.

Even those of us who worried when he ran on a platform of redistributing America’s wealth and overturning a first-rate health care system held out the hope that the nation’s racial wounds would finally be healed by the election of the first black president. Instead, every time there was a conflict between cops and black criminals, he sided with the latter, taking every opportunity to pick at racial scabs and creating, whenever possible, a whole new set of scars.

For years, people waited in vain to hear Germany apologize for the Holocaust; for the Japanese to apologize for Pearl Harbor and for turning thousands of Korean women into whores for the convenience of their soldiers; and for the Turks to apologize for the genocide of the Armenians.

I, for one, am still waiting for the Democrats to apologize for the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws and for passing welfare legislation in the 1960s that they knew would destroy the family unit in the black community by chasing black men out of their homes and make black women and children dependent on the federal government to support them. The Democrats, Lyndon Johnson in particular, knew it was the one sure way to lock up the black vote for generations to come.

People, like dogs, he understood, are unlikely to bite the hand that feeds them.

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I heard from a reader in Louisiana who let me know that he had just returned from the funeral of a white 54-year-old farmer.

He wondered how the talking heads at CNN, MSNBC, and ABC would have reacted to the racial makeup of his pallbearers. It seems they were all black men who had worked for him and his father before him.

“I wonder,” he wrote, “when those nasty people will discover the warm friendships that exist between white and black people here in the South.”

I wrote back to say: “I’m not a southerner, but it always struck me as highly ironic that it was the so-called southern bigots who were far more likely to have black friends than the holier-than-thou northerners who looked down their noses at southerners, while regarding themselves as the real friends of blacks, even though they didn’t personally happen to know any.”

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In a related matter, we have the wonderful lawsuit filed against Harvard College by Asian Americans for the school’s discriminatory admission policy.

The college’s laughable defense is that it is merely trying to advance affirmative action in the holy name of diversity by offering blacks and Hispanics the opportunity to become as brilliant as the white students, apparently through the process of osmosis.

The folks at Harvard apparently subscribe to the magical properties of secondhand air. Apparently, merely breathing the same, or at least similar, air that has been inhaled and exhaled by the likes of Al Gore, FDR, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Tim Kaine, Ashley Judd, Ted Kennedy and his father Joseph, Richard Blumenthal, Al Franken, Chuck Schumer, Barney Frank, Allan Grayson, Timothy Leary, Alger Hiss, and Ted (The Unabomber) Kaczynski is supposed to turn mediocre students into intellectual heavyweights.

The inevitable result of affirmative action is that when, in the name of social justice, you favor one or two racial groups, such as blacks and Hispanics, you are also discriminating against others, such as whites and Asians. There are, after all, only finite slots available to be filled by incoming freshmen at places like Harvard and Berkeley.

But a second and nearly equally corrosive result of the practice that’s never mentioned is that it diminishes the accomplishments of academically superior blacks and Hispanics. A diploma from an Ivy League school is supposed to mean something, but so long as everyone knows that when it’s on the wall of a graduate who may have been the recipient of affirmative action, everyone who looks at the framed parchment will see a large question mark imposed on it.

A diploma, after all, is supposed to denote scholastic achievement and not suggest the graduate was merely the recipient of a charitable act.

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A picture that has gone viral shows a mosquito on a person’s hand with the caption: “And just like that, Elizabeth Warren’s Indian blood was gone.”

What it fails to mention is that there is now a mosquito who is a full-blooded Cherokee who happens to be sitting at his phone, waiting for a call from Harvard offering him a full professorship.

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A man stood in the doorway looking at his wife. She was seated and looking at herself in the mirror. She appeared to be sad, and as her birthday was just a week away, he decided to cheer her up by asking her what she’d like to have for the occasion.

“I’d like to be eight again.”

So it was that on the morning of her birthday, he got up early, made her a breakfast of Coco Pops, and then whisked her off to Adventure World theme park.

He got her on every ride in the park, including the Death Slide, the Wall of Fear, and the gravity-defying roller coaster known as the Screaming Mimi.

Five hours later, they staggered out of the place. He then rounded off the day by taking her to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal with extra fries and a chocolate shake.

Then it was off to see “Star Wars XXIII” to the accompaniment of buttered popcorn and M&Ms.

When they finally got home that evening, she flopped exhausted on the bed.

Her hubby, mentally clapping himself on the shoulder for a job well done, couldn’t help asking her how it felt to be eight again.

She stopped moaning with the pains of terminal indigestion long enough to say, “You idiot, I was referring to my dress size.”

The moral of the story is that even when a man is listening, never assume he’s hearing what you’re saying.

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But sometimes, as in this joke that comes our way from Bert Black, he is.

Each Friday evening, when he got home from his job, Bubba would fire up his grill and cook a venison steak.

But most of Bubba’s neighbors were Catholic, and since it was Lent, they were forbidden to eat meat on Friday.

The glorious aroma of the cooking venison was driving his neighbors nuts. They even took their problem to the local priest.

After giving it some thought, Father Fitzgerald visited Bubba and suggested that for the sake of maintaining cordial relations with his neighbors, he consider converting to Catholicism. Bubba agreed to do it.

After taking a number of classes, Bubba was ready to attend Mass. As Father Fitzgerald sprinkled holy water over him, the priest said: “You were a Baptist, and raised a Baptist, but now you are a Catholic.”

Bubba’s neighbors were delighted to hear the news. But came Friday night, and the air was once again filled with the aroma of venison sizzling away over charcoal. Father Fitzgerald got the call. He was shocked.

He picked up his rosary and ran over to Bubba’s house, ready to scold him.

But as he reached the backyard, he saw Bubba holding a small bottle of holy water, which he carefully sprinkled over the cooking meat, while chanting in solemn tones: “You was born a deer, you was raised a deer, but now you is a catfish.”