I believe it was that seer, that shaman among shamen, Rodney King, who first asked, ever so plaintively: why can’t we all just get along? Unfortunately, he didn’t ask me.

If I recall events correctly, he was about to be handed a check for a few million dollars signed by the taxpayers of Los Angeles. It seems that after getting high on PCP and driving 100 mph through our streets in order to evade arrest, he was slightly manhandled by a bunch of cops who were nearly as high as he was, thanks to the rush of adrenaline brought on by the high-speed chase and the idiot’s refusal to be handcuffed.

In the intervening years, millions of illegal aliens have bled our states dry, taking advantage of our medical facilities, our schools, our food stamps and, of course, our prisons. They, too, wonder why we can’t all just get along.

The same is true of thousands of blacks who were paid big bucks if they had ever farmed, considered farming, seen a farm or, I suppose, eaten a cucumber. Thousands of people who could barely tell the difference between a hoe and a ho were bribed with our money by political hacks who hoped grateful blacks would remember their names on Election Day.

I’m not sure how one would go about inventing a better mousetrap at this late date, but if you want to round up Democrats, you merely have to use cold hard cash as bait.

Sometimes, though, in lieu of greenbacks, gifts will do just as well. It seems that Mrs. Obama wants the feds to give tax breaks to mothers who breast-feed. Michele Bachmann, who has breast-fed all five of her children, told Laura Ingraham, “To think that the government has to go out and buy my breast pump so I can feed my babies! You wanna talk about the nanny state, I think you just got a new definition.”

Any of you who have ever experienced having house guests who overstayed their welcome will know what I mean when I say I can’t wait for the Obamas to leave. In this case, it isn’t your house or my house, it’s our house; it’s the White House to which I refer.

Thanks to Donald Trump, Obama’s phantom birth certificate was finally presented to the world. The truth is, my sole concern with the issue is that the Founding Fathers thought the birthplace of our presidents was important enough to mention in the Constitution. Otherwise, I, personally, wouldn’t have a problem with the foreign-born being able to occupy the Oval Office. I have no doubt that many of our most decent fellow Americans hail from places as far-flung as Formosa, Czechoslovakia, Israel, Peru and Australia.

My objections to Obama have nothing to do with his race or his country of origin, everything to do with his character, his policies and his inner circle of friends and associates.

Just for the record, though, until now I didn’t believe he was born in Hawaii. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he have shown his birth certificate early on, long before his comrades had come up with “birther,” a term of contempt that, miraculously, would have been synonymous with “patriot” if the president in question had been a Republican.

Even now, Obama continues to keep his college application and college transcripts under wraps, although liberals never weary of telling us how astonishingly brilliant the guy is. Maybe it’s just the skeptic in me, but he hardly strikes me as the sort who would conceal his marvelous academic accomplishments under a bushel if they were even half as breathtaking as we’ve been led to believe.

Now that his place of birth has been established, don’t be surprised if a few of Obama’s acolytes come forward to swear that when he left the islands to enter college in California, they actually witnessed young Obama walk from Hawaii to the mainland. You’ll be able to read all about it in the Newest Testament.

If you think I’m being unfair to liberals, let me remind you that when Obama’s predecessor was in office, not a day went by when the MSM didn’t let us know how many American soldiers were dying in Bush’s wars. Garry Trudeau even devoted Sunday editions of Doonesbury to listing the names of the fallen. Anyone find it odd that now that Obama is in charge, you don’t get a daily, weekly or even monthly, update of numbers and names? Well, just for the record, nearly 1,500 American warriors have died in Afghanistan over the past 10 years, with two-thirds of the fatalities occurring since it became Obama’s war in 2009!

Whenever I hear liberal elitists, including but not limited to such bubble-dwellers as New York Times columnists, network anchormen and liberal arts professors, referring to us conservatives as right-wing bozos, racists, fascists, homophobes and run-of-the-mill ignoramuses, I recall that G.K. Chesterton, one of my all-time favorite English wits, once wisely observed that “Without education we are in the horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”