While I acknowledge that there is a world of difference between conspiring to do something and merely considering it, when Ahmed Ghailani was found guilty of conspiring to blow up a government building, I bet there were millions of us who briefly flashed on those occasions when we thought about blowing up courthouses, city halls, DMV offices and the U.S. Senate.

In the wake of the Ghailani debacle with a civilian jury, we were told that even a military tribunal wouldn’t have found him guilty on those 284 other charges because “enhanced interrogation” had been used on the main witness. Frankly, that seemed insane to me. No matter what was done to make the witness come clean, what does that have to do with Ghailani’s involvement in blowing up American embassies and murdering hundreds of innocent people? It is at such times that I find myself wondering if Sharia law could be any more ludicrous than the legal system we already have.

Is it just me or does all the recent rioting seem even more embarrassing than usual? In England and the U.S., the most disgusting, most privileged generation the world has ever known seems to feel entitled to run wild any time the cost of college tuition is raised. What makes their childish hissy fits all the more reprehensible is that these punks rarely pay their own way. If anyone is going to riot, it should be their parents. But the targets of their outrage should be themselves for having raised these hordes of arrogant, obnoxious louts. And while we’re on the subject, it’s high time the 26th amendment was repealed. If 70 is the new 60, and 60 is the new 50, it’s fair to say that 18 is the new eight. Giving the vote to a bunch of brats who are still collecting an allowance, thus allowing them to cancel out the votes of their elders is inane. The sad irony is that the only youngsters who deserve to vote are members of the military, and they’re the ones whose ballots are least likely to be counted.

Running the young squirts a close second when it comes to causing trouble are the creeps in France who are running amok because economic circumstances demand that the retirement age be lifted from 60 to 62. These are the same folks who get six weeks of paid vacation every year. That’s one more month than Americans get, which means that in the course of 40 years, they are already working 40 fewer months than we are.

On the other hand, there was a huge outcry when a committee designed to get America out of its own financial morass suggested we might consider raising our own retirement age to 68…60 years or so down the line! Judging by the hue and cry, you might have thought we were all little children. And maybe we are.

When people wonder why the Democrats spend so much time pandering to black voters, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Democrats have to pander and blacks have to agree to play the role of poor, oppressed victims. That’s because Democrats can’t win a presidential election if they don’t continue to garner 90% of black votes. The truth is that in no presidential election since LBJ trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964 has the Democratic candidate, whether he won or lost the election, received 50% of the white vote!

The odd thing is that blacks used to resent the way they were depicted in the movies, when performers like Stepin Fetchit (nee Lincoln Perry), Willie Best and Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen, spent their entire careers acting stupid, shiftless and superstitious. These days, Hollywood shows us blacks like Denzel Washington, Samuel Jackson, Halle Berry and Morgan Freeman, smart, wise and highly competent. Yet a great many blacks in real life seem to be modeling themselves on those earlier portrayals.

But it’s not just the liberals who have been babying blacks for far too long. Whether it’s their violent crime statistics, their illegitimate birth rate, their involvement with illegal drugs or their basic illiteracy, white America chooses to either ignore the damning truth or to don the mantle of guilt. We even employ euphemisms, referring to those “bad sections of town” we’d be wise to avoid, whether we live in Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston, Detroit or L.A., when we all know it’s code for those urban areas mainly populated by blacks. We pretend we’re talking about poor sections, but there are plenty of poor rural sections of America, and nobody fears they’ll be killed, mugged or raped, if they go there.

Furthermore, far too many blacks have an intolerance of education that verges on the psychotic. One of the sorriest aspects of all this is that it’s not atypical for black kids who show the slightest sign of scholarship being accused of acting white. It is simultaneously a nasty insult to the black kids and an unwarranted compliment for white ones.

Until we all start speaking openly and honestly about the facts of racial life, we’re doomed to be led around by the nose by such scoundrels and hypocrites as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the members of the Black Congressional Caucus.

I acknowledge I might be asking for a miracle. After all, we have become such a nation of wusses that our own president won’t even identify our sworn enemies as Islamics, and Homeland Security has to pretend that five-year-olds and their grandmas are every bit as likely to blow up planes as 25-year-old Saudis named Mohammad.