I used to get a warm feeling when I’d read or hear the words to be found at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a poem titled “The New Colossus,” and written by Emma Lazarus. Among its odd requests are that the world give us “your poor, your huddled masses, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.” In the wake of tens of millions sneaking into the country, I think we need to replace that welcome mat with something a little more commonsensical. We are now at 305 million, and I think we’ve got enough wretched refuse to last us a while. However, if we ever find ourselves running short, we don’t need to import any; we merely have to elect ordinary Americans to public office.

Something I find amazing is that those on the left have the gall to pass themselves off as not only smarter than the rest of us, but more compassionate. How is it they manage to pull it off with a straight face when those on the left turned the 20th century into one big bloodbath? For all their big talk, the major accomplishment of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro and Guevara, was refining various techniques for murdering multitudes. As if it wasn’t bad enough that they managed to kill tens of millions of people, what made it even worse is that the American left was complicit every bloody inch of the way.

When Stalin was starving six million Ukrainian peasants, Walter Duranty of the NY Times was copping a Pulitzer Prize by writing odes about Uncle Joe; when Hitler and Stalin signed their mutual non-aggression pact, the left in America insisted it was none of our business when Germany invaded Poland, France, Holland and Finland, but when Hitler double-crossed his partner in crime and attacked the Soviet Union, Lillian Hellman famously rushed into a New York cocktail party and announced: “We’ve been invaded!”

It was just a scant three decades later, when Jane Fonda, who would, quite appropriately, portray a fictionalized, heroic Hellman in “Julia,” would proudly pose with a group of North Vietnamese soldiers.

To be fair, there is one obnoxious habit that politicians on both sides of the aisle should resolve to break in the new year. I refer to the naming of bridges, roads and post offices, after themselves and one another. I understand the desire to be immortalized, and to garner name identification without having to blow campaign funds on billboards and TV spots, but unless politicians spend their own money erecting the bridge or paving the highway, the only place I want to see a politician’s name is on a ballot or, better yet, a criminal indictment.

Like most normal people, I cringed when Sarah Palin momentarily misspoke, referring to our ally, “North Korea,” before quickly correcting herself. I cringed only because I knew the lunkheads on the left would use it to bash her on the head. It never fails to repulse me how the same nincompoops in the media who ignored Obama’s reference to our 57 states will glom onto anything, no matter how infinitesimal or irrelevant, in an attempt to prove Mrs. Palin is a blithering idiot.

Speaking of blithering idiots, I recently learned that it costs us $182,000 for every hour that Obama is aboard Air Force One. I understand that the cost is the same, whoever the president is, but I seem to recall that Obama was using it to fly all over the country in order to campaign for Democrats during the mid-term elections. That means that when he flew across the continent to campaign for Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray, the roundtrip cost the American taxpayer two million dollars. God knows, none of those trips were for the good of our nation. They were strictly partisan in nature, and I therefore want the federal accounting office to send the bill to the DNC.

Finally, all along I have been observing Janet Napolitano’s recent airport security measures from the point of view of the American public. Thanks to political correction, millions of us are being forced to choose between being zapped with radiation or having our private parts made public. And it’s all because the feds don’t want to be accused of paying undue attention to those swarthy young Muslims named Ahmed flying one way without baggage to Yemen.

But perhaps instead of just focusing on our own discomfort, we should take a moment to empathize with the TSA agents. Picture yourself being one of those people a few years down the road and having your child ask, “Daddy, what did you do during the War on Terror?” and having to reply, “I groped grandmothers and three-year-olds.”