Recently, I was thrown for a loop when a friend of mine said he could no longer regard himself as a Republican because he lacked what he referred to as the mean gene.

I tried not to take it personally. But my own tender feelings aside, I found it a shocking statement because, from my perspective, most of the really nasty people I know are Democrats. In fact, my main objection to conservatives is that they tend to be too polite, too mealy-mouthed, too damn reluctant to confront liberals.

Those on the Left never grow tired of labeling conservatives as racists, fascists and homophobes, while those on the Right suggest with their wimpy denials that there just might be some truth to the charges. As Daniel Greenfield once wrote, “They don’t have to silence us if we silence ourselves.”

There are racists in America, but for the most part they’re to be found in the black population and among those in the Democratic party who patronize blacks and Hispanics in exchange for their votes. When liberals refer to black Republicans and black members of the Tea Party as “Uncle Toms” and “oreos,” what is that but blatant racism? But that is invariably the fate of those blacks who dare to wander off the liberal plantation.

It annoys me that conservatives are so unwilling to speak the truth about, say, the Black Congressional Caucus, which is, along with the Aryan Brotherhood, probably one of the two most racist groups in the country. The difference between the two outfits is that the members of the Brotherhood produce and sell crystal meth to other creeps, while the knuckleheads in the Caucus help make our laws and squander our tax dollars.

Two short years ago, half a dozen members of the Caucus visited Cuba and came back praising Fidel Castro. It reminded me of the useful idiots who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s and returned to the U.S., ballyhooing Stalin’s bloody regime. The very same folks who brought back glowing reports about the Cuban thug spend most of their waking hours playing the race card, slandering the Tea Party and fully supporting every idiotic notion concocted by Barack Obama. Congress, being what it is, it’s hard to imagine that any relatively small group could have brought additional disgrace to it, but Bobby Rush, Emanuel Cleaver, Mel Watt, Marcia Fudge, Laura Richardson and Michael Honda, the Havana Six, somehow managed.

A question worth considering is how it was that many years ago, black Americans organized to banish “Amos ‘n’ Andy” from TV because it allegedly maligned the image of blacks, and now, all these years later, blacks not only don’t utter an honest word about these political hacks, but keep re-electing them. At least, unlike second-rate clowns like John Conyers, Charley Rangel, Keith Ellison, John Lewis, Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee, “Amos ‘n’ Andy” managed to be funny intentionally.

Another question I have for my fellow conservatives is why they have continued donating money to those alma maters that banished the ROTC or military recruiters from their campuses. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it difficult to reconcile claiming to be patriotic while supporting unpatriotic institutions.

On a positive note, I should mention that I don’t know if he’s actually planning to run, but I find I like Donald Trump more and more. For one thing, I already knew from his past statements that he holds the U.N. in just as much contempt as I do. I also know that he had the guts to appear at the CPAC get-together and tell Ron Paul’s acolytes to their face that their favorite cult figure has no chance of winning a presidential election. Then, for good measure, Trump went on The Factor and answered just about every question that Bill O'Reilly threw at him the exact same way I would.

What’s more, he’s tall, and we all know that height is apparently even more essential in presidential races than it is in the NBA.

So far as I can see, Trump is Chris Christie with a few billion dollars. Which, to me, sounds like the answer to a conservative’s prayers.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I watched “The Godfather” for about the tenth time. This time, though, it suddenly occurred to me that the studio chief was lucky because he only had to wake up once with a horse’s head in his bed. Poor Teresa Heinz-Kerry, the senator’s wife, not only wakes up every morning with a horse’s head on the pillow next to her, but with its rump under the covers.