You may not have stayed up late to watch them, but then not everybody enjoys humor that’s slightly obscene.

Is this country, the mightiest the world has ever known, really about to choose between the thin resumes of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin?

Sure, I know what you’re thinking. Obama is running against John McCain, not his Republican running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

But let’s face it, Americans think that the geezer McCain will be dead about two weeks after the election. But that’s a terribly ugly thing to say. My personal theory, after watching his acceptance speech, is that he has already been deceased for about three weeks now.

He looked like he had his makeup done at Sol Levinson’s.

Since Obama’s not going to win and McCain is a goner, we all better get used to the idea of “President Palin.”

In the fine tradition of the far right wing of her party, Palin has an unmarried 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant. I don’t mean to imply that the party of Family Values has a lot of unmarried mothers in it, just a lot of hypocrites.

Democrats weren’t as quick to jump on this embarrassment as you might think. They were preaching restraint and the sanctity of a candidate’s private life. At least they were until someone could prove for a deadlock certainty that Bill Clinton was nowhere near the state of Alaska about seven months ago.

Meanwhile, suddenly Palin has become one of the most powerful people in U.S. politics, poised to step onto the world stage. That’s pretty good considering that just a few weeks ago none of us had ever even heard of her.

I’m not proud to admit this, but I wasn’t even certain that Alaskans were eligible to be president. Of course we now all know that they shouldn’t.

What’s really ballyhooed about this election is that it is guaranteed to be historic no matter who wins. If Obama ascends we will have our first African-American president. If McCain wins we will have our first female in the executive branch.

I find these things to be incidentals, really unworthy of serious consideration or discussion. What’s more fascinating to me is that Palin, a former Miss Alaska runner-up, gives us the historic possibility of our first-ever attractive executive.

That’s not really true; Lyndon Johnson was a pretty sexy fellow.

For some, Palin’s slogan could be something like “Tippecanoe and nice gams, too!” For others, she and her husband give us our first possibility of sex in the Oval Office. Umm, never mind.

Of course looks are very superficial things and there are so many serious issues at stake here. The people that run these austere campaigns wouldn’t want us making sport out of their candidates when there are apocalyptic financial and military situations looming out there.

It’s not like they are running their conventions in football stadiums or spouting one-liners that are written by Hollywood mavens just to pander to the electorate.

Still, just in case they aren’t taking the job seriously enough, as your JEWISH TIMES commentator I’m here to help you sort it all out. Today I announce my endorsement.

Don’t vote for Obama –– he’s made of wood and doesn’t have a single idea. Don’t vote for McCain –– as I said before, send his wife a bereavement card.

Instead, do something useful and vote for Joe Flacco.

Jack Gilden, president of the Baltimore-based Gilden Integrated, writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES.

Perhaps it’s an unknown fact to a vast majority of our readership, but something quite significant happened last week: baseball’s non-waiver trade deadline passed.

As usual our heroes, the Orioles, did nothing to disturb their millionaire’s club. Not a single bum departed, nor a messiah come. Perhaps team management is hoping to extend its Ripken-like streak of flops, folds and failures.

By contrast, in New England and New York, the end of July is a veritable Chanukah with new stars galloping in at the nick of time to save the day and capture the coveted American League East flag. In Baltimore, July 31 is only the ritual date when we stop singing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” at Camden Yards and replace it with the Mourner’s Kaddish. This year, 2008, will be the 11th straight year the Orioles end the season with a losing record, a tuchas in the AL East.

As Jews, we have a special kinship with Orioles fans; after all we, too, have suffered for thousands of years. But more than that, the Orioles always seemed a particularly Yiddish team.

Consider this:

• They keep their heads covered with little black hats.

• They have their own Decalogue, (called the Oriole Way), but they don’t live by it.

• And it was brought to the world by Cal Ripken Sr., a red-necky Moses if there ever was one.

• They’ve even suffered overt mother/son issues, or have you forgotten Earl Weaver vs. Jim Palmer?

• Among their many brilliant personnel decisions they bought a surly outfielder named Albert Belle who played just two years for $65 million. That was their bread of haste.

• During the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s they won the pennant six times; that was their Jerusalem. For the last 25 years they’ve been conquered, scattered and persecuted. That’s their wilderness.

In the crude but common vernacular, they suck. The real question is: Does it even matter anymore?

Baseball at the major league level has imploded by a combination of money-motivated decisions. The wild card and inter-league play have ruined the natural rhythms of the game. Steroid abuse, undoubtedly on some levels a joint business venture of the owners and players, was a grand-scale fraud.

And yet baseball persists, primarily as a language that connects far-flung generations. I once used it as a way to converse with my grandfathers, one of whom stretched back to the Orioles of John McGraw and Wee Willie Keeler. He grew up in the same downtown neighborhood as Babe Ruth.

My other grandfather, an immigrant and a salesman, found in baseball the only thing he might discuss with clients. Or grandsons.

No matter how badly they torture the game, these pleasures persist. In the past few years I’ve been able to introduce my own kids to the game.

Last year I took my daughter to a business function in a luxury skybox, a place she hopes to return. “Daddy,” she says, “when can we go back to that eating room?”

My son calls me every morning at work to get caught up on the race: “OK, Dad, what happened last night?” And then he forces me to discuss every team in both leagues, and their mathematical chances.

He is as much an Oriole fan as he is a Jew, and as such his interests stretch far beyond the present to a mythical past. He begs me over and over to recount the ancient oral tradition of our people.

“Dad,” he says, “tell me again what it was like back when the Orioles didn’t stink?”

I got off to a good start, with a very manly prototype. Unfortunately soon after those in control of the manufacturing plant lost interest in research and development. Only one more finished product rolled off that assembly room floor ––a girl. We named her Iliana, or Illy for short.

Her handle is Greek, not Jewish, though she was named in honor of my grandfather, Isidore, a peripatetic fiddler. It also derives from “The Iliad,” my favorite book, read aloud to my wife one captivating chapter at a time when we were dating.

Despite these sentimental accoutrements I was anxious about raising a girl. I’m rough-hewn, to say the least, more a pleaser to a group of men than a charmer to women. In other words, without relying on gastronomic music as an icebreaker, I wasn’t sure I could relate to another person.

I also was terrified. My face resembles a landsman gorilla freshly sprung from a zoo. What if my little flower inherited my goonish features and hairy back?

I decided that that was crazy. I mean my mother is beautiful, my sisters aren’t bad and my wife, to me, was a dish. With any luck my baby doll would be like them.

That’s when the real terror hit. What if she actually turned out attractive?

The mere thought of it released a homicidal maniac inside me. Fifteen years from now a guy, the inevitable greasy, pimply aspiring thug, rings my bell and says: “Hey Pop, where’s your daughter?”

The answer: Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam.

But then it all changed.

In her little baby eyes I started seeing a love unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was as though her lenses contained a shmoe filter to clear away baldness, shortness and inadequacy and replace it with an indestructible man soaring through the sky, tallis flapping in the wind.

She used to reach out from her high chair and grab my nose in her little fingers. Pulling me close, she would give me a kiss on it amid peels of laughter, perhaps mistaking it for a plantain.

And then one day, instead of a kiss, she clamped down with her brand new incisors while I howled in pain. Had the proboscis not been the length and circumference of a goodly sized oak limb, she might have sawed the whole thing off.

Despite all this, older ladies, wise in the ways of fathers and daughters, kept warning me to hold onto my heart. “A girl is a totally different thing,” they said. One Saturday this summer I found out what they meant.

My two kids and I were at a park when I became very ill with a migraine. My head throbbed and my eyes felt like they were going to bounce out of their sockets.

All of the sudden my little princess took control. “Daddy,” she said. “I want you to go right home so I can be your nurse.” When we got back to the house I lay down in bed while, one by one, she brought her stuffed animals and placed them in a circle around the cadaver.

Illy sat next to me for a half-hour and petted my hand until the pain was gone. All the while her brother was in the other room banging pots and pans in an apparent effort to remove my brain with a corkscrew of sound waves.

At that moment I had to admit it: Having a girl is not at all like having another boy. And thank God for that.

Jack Gilden, president of the Baltimore-based Gilden Integrated, writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES.

But the question’s really not that innocent, is it?

“Where did you go to school?” is a gateway for our own nosiness. It really means: How much does your father make? Are you Irish or Italian? Catholic or Protestant? Professional or tradesman? And finally, Jewish or gentile?

It’s all just part of the invisible but palpable chaste system around here. Perhaps that’s why violations of it create so much confusion.

Last month, BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES Executive Editor Phil Jacobs wrote a fascinating piece about alleged anti-Semitism at Boys’ Latin School and its effects on two brothers, Max and Aaron Linkoff.

Right off the bat, the story feels disjointed because it’s about Jews at a snooty old institution in Roland Park. Anyway, the story makes it seem like the BL gang was having a heil of a good time with these Jewish boys. But it’s a little hard to tell.

It seems clear that Max, a talented lacrosse player and high school student, was driven from the idyllic campus by atrocious and unambiguous behavior. The administration’s response, at least as reported, seemed inadequate.

Nevertheless, Aaron, a junior high student, returned to BL this year. His story ends the same way, with a transfer, but his situation seems murkier.

The primary evidence of prejudice was a noose, woven from lacrosse mesh and tossed at him in the locker room. I’m not sure what the slipknot imputes as a symbol to Jews, but at best it’s dubiously anti-Semitic. To my knowledge, only one Jew was ever among the strange fruit ripening in U.S. trees.

Anyway, the Linkoffs complained, the JEWISH TIMES wrote, and the outrage flew. Letters poured in from Jewish and gentile defenders of BL, and from offended Jews outside the school community.

As for me, I think the anger, at least in Aaron’s case, was more about adults than students. The junior high years are a time when boys are aggressive. Fistfights and threats are common. The kids are physically maturing even as their brains are toddling behind.

In other words, it’s normal for them to want to murder each other, but I think a little much to assume it’s purely for philosophical reasons like deicide.

The Linkoff boys were merely living God’s mission for the Jews. They traveled east of the River Jones Falls to dwell among the gentiles. And they got burned.

As usual, the story burns up the rest of us. We suspect that the mainstream BL kids are merely engaging in behaviors they learned from their parents. We imagine their schools as mini-versions of their clubs, and clubby business institutions.

Maybe there’s some truth in that, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that the “Noose Weaver” is a nice kid. I know him, and I go back two decades with his parents. They are utterly progressive, unprejudiced people.

They are mortified by their son’s behavior and petrified by the inference. As adults, they have a nuanced understanding of anti-Semitism and the long, violent history that goes with it. Their son is just a kid living in a sheltered world. He couldn’t possibly know that his sparring with one boy could carry centuries of burden.

Interestingly, the same week the BL story broke, I received a deluge of letters concerning my column about Jeremiah Wright. The Jews who wrote were unanimously disgusted by my attack on that villainous mentor to our esteemed Democratic candidate. One missive even likened me to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin!

I was overwhelmed by the symmetry. To many Jews, the moronic scuffles of little buttheads were a sign of a coming pogrom. Yet the vile statements of a mature and hateful man, with decades of sway over our likely next president, were essentially meaningless.

So this week, I’ve got a request for Baltimore Jewry: Stop asking each other where you went to school. Instead, find out why you didn’t learn anything.

Seldom do we see such a sterling example of all our failings as we do in Rev. Wright: a nut, a numbskull and a media whore.

As both the signal influence on one of our most serious presidential aspirants and that very same man’s undoing, we might rightly call this pastor the most powerful man in American politics today.

I’m going to give you a second to absorb the stunning truth of that statement before I ask the logical follow-up: What in the hell are we doing in this country?

Didn’t we recently see 2,000 of our countrymen incinerated in the name of religious quackery? Weren’t we willing to spill oceans of blood ourselves, in multiple wars, waste billions of dollars, destabilize the world and give oil prices a hot foot, all to defeat crackpot mullahs?

And yet here is our eminent Democratic Party on the verge of rejecting one of this country’s legendary political families, the revered Clintons, to voluntarily anoint Rev. Wright’s protégé, Barack Obama.

Obama told us all from Day One about the sway the good Reverend held over him: How Wright “converted” him, presided over his marriage and baptized his girls. Obama told us how he even named his intellectual offspring, “The Audacity of Hope” after a Wright sermon.

Now we know what they might’ve talked about: They might have palavered about the U.S. government inventing the AIDS virus to slaughter American blacks. And hypothetically they blabbed about America the terrorist state.

Whether or not Obama actually knew about his reverend’s convictions, we must call into question his abilities as a chief executive since he made a mistake that any third-rate marketing professional would’ve avoided. He hitched his star to a celebrity spokesman. That’s not a bad strategy unless that spokesman turns out to have an unpleasant odor. Just ask Hertz Rent A Car how that O.J. endorsement is working out.

Obama has gone to great lengths to assure Americans that he is a Christian, yet his pastor walks around surrounded by a phalanx of armed Muslim bodyguards and praises extremist Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan as one of “the great men of the 20th century.” Wright even refers to Farrakhan as the “E.F. Hutton of the black community.” He’s also Farrakhan’s defender, claiming falsely that the Nation of Islam leader called Zionism, not Judaism, a gutter religion.

Are any of our readers members of the Zionist faith?

What’s really inexplicable is how many left-leaning Jews are untroubled by Obama’s connection to Wright. Can you imagine the reaction of our European forefathers? They had no say in choosing the politicians who ruled them, and they suffered centuries of calamity.

They would never believe that their very own descendants would one day willingly choose an Obama and his despicable pastor.

What would they do if they could see it?

In the 26 volumes of the Queen’s English, there’s not a single word fit to describe it. No, for this, we need to turn to the Yiddish. Because the only way to say it is, those old Jews would plotz

That, as it turns out, was a gross distortion of the truth.

As a reminder, my column was about my six-year-old son Max’s burgeoning wrestling career. The piece ended ignominiously, with Max tragically reduced to a pretzel and gazing heavenward faster than it usually takes him to hide his vegetables.

This is what forced me to draw the comparisons to my own career as high school grappler, midfielder and quarterback. Crappiness nonpareil.

In truth my son looks a lot like me (or a barnyard rooster). He’s short, thick of chest and cocky. Very, very cocky. But unlike his old man, he’s got the goods to back it up.

A few Sundays ago we landed at the Maryland State wrestling tournament, “The States.” Viewing it all reverently, I thought it looked like Hoosiers on a mat. Someone less charitable referred to it as “a kind of JonBenet pageant for stinky little boys.”

Either way, going into The States, Max was on fire. In his last two tournaments, his record was five and one, including his first gold medal.

Perhaps that was on his mind when he walked through the tournament doors and announced: “Dad, today is my day. I’m gonna win this whole thing.”

I told him to shut his mouth, lest he jinx it. “Get your skinny little tuchus out there and just wrestle,” I said.

The first match didn’t bode well. Max drew a scrappy kid, more than a year younger and even smaller than he was. Despite these advantages, Max struggled. There was even controversy when one of his fingers clipped the poor kid in the eye, causing an eruption of protest from his corner.

In the end, Max squeaked out a victory on points, but he came off the mat chastened: “Dad, I was lucky to beat him,” he said. “He’s way tougher and stronger than I am.”

Max was right. That kid, the brother of a U.S. champion, went on to beat every other wrestler in the weight class, pinning three hapless victims along the way. But Max kept ticking off the victories, too. And the once unthinkable was becoming plausible; he had a real shot to be State Champ.

But first The Contender had to pee. Chaperoning him to the men’s room I shielded him from the ruinous siren of the trophy table.

He must’ve peeked, anyway. When we got back, he finally faltered, counter-moved to defeat by a crafty little puppy.

That left the title in doubt. Max and his first opponent finished with identical records. This kid’s old man, a tough customer in his own right, kept a watchful eye on the officials’ deliberations. And so did I.

When the judges awarded Max the title, due to his head-to-head victory, the other father pronounced the tournament, “A joke.” Then he crowded me: “Your kid’s a cheater,” he growled. “He gouged my son’s eyes.”

Max’s mother, viewing from a distance, asked me if I retaliated. “It’s little kid wrestling,” I shrugged, “Anyway, did you see the size of that guy?”

Max toted his gigantic trophy from the room to a million back slaps. His coach, smiling, put an arm around him: “You have a great chance to win it again next year,” he said.

“No thanks,” the Champ responded. “Next year, I’m playing basketball.”

This winter my boy Max, 5 years old, walked out onto the wrestling mat for the first time. If you’re a father, you might kvell at the thought, but in me it provoked both pride and fear.

I’ve had a long-held belief that every generation of so-called men is exponentially sissier than the one that preceded it. For instance, the Gilden family: My grandfather, the original Max Gilden, grew up on the shtetl. He lived in a one-room house with three families and a dirt floor. When he left Russia, Cossack bullets were whizzing by his giant ears. Then he hitchhiked to America on a cattle boat where he had to shack up with amorous bovines.

He made his living the hard way, first at the Sparrows Point blast furnace and then, more prestigiously, hawking shmattes. Finally, he settled in as a grocer, toiling from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., six days per week. After that, death — probably from exhaustion.

His son, my father, was a high school cheerleader.

See what I mean?

I tried to reverse this trend and rally the family manliness. I was a varsity football player for Owings Mills’ Screaming Eagles. But at 112 pounds, I was no “Big Daddy” Lipscomb. Fortunately, I made up for my runtiness with poor coordination, bad hands, slowness, pre-spinach biceps and an indefinable effeminacy.

So given my theories, what would Max do? We signed him up with the North Baltimore Wrestling Club, a kind of gathering place for hyperactive gentile spawn, and waited to see.

I swelled with pride when Max put on his uniform, which is called a singlet, but was deflated again when his mother referred to it as a “onesie.”

At practice, he allayed my fears and beat all the wrestlers in his weight class. Yet it was hard to be too enthusiastic. Deep down I knew his success was based less on knowledge of the moves, and more on a streak of amiable homicide.

Anyway, as he readied himself for his first tournament, I didn’t know what to expect. But, as usual, I knew what to say. I steeled him by telling him that he was descended from the mysterious desert tribe that had invented wrestling.

“Really,” he said, “the Jews invented wrestling?”

“Better than that,” I told him, “the very first Jew actually wrestled God.”

His eyes grew wide with the pleasure of this news. “You mean, Jacob? He wrestled God?”

“That’s right,” I said. “In fact, when it was over, he changed his name to Israel and that means, ‘Wrestles with God.’”

“Why did Jacob and God wrestle?”

“I guess all Jews tangle with God,” I said. “We fight Him in our souls, struggle with Him, to understand His purpose.”

I wondered if his 5-year-old mind could possibly grasp what I was trying to tell him, but he knew more than I thought.

“So, Israel was Jacob,” he said.

“That’s right. Who was Jacob’s father?”

“Isaac,” he snapped, beaming at his own brilliance.

“OK!” My voice was rising, too. “Who was Isaac’s father?”

“Ooh, ooh, I know this,” he said, almost bursting. “Isaac’s father was Abraham, Abraham Lincoln!”

The next day, David’s successor appeared in the circle of battle. In about two seconds, his first-ever opponent descended upon him like a lion on a gazelle, bringing him down and tying him up in bitter defeat.

He’s his father’s son, all right. 

And the world teeters.

In the aftermath of her violent death, Bhutto’s nation is a dormant volcano bubbling to life with fissile zealotry. The jihadists and nuclear arsonists just may have their day. Or at least they will as soon as they get around to killing the country’s actual leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Mrs. Bhutto has become a martyr in death, inevitable given her sensational physical appearance and her well-crafted rhetoric. When she returned to her country last October, she wrote a manifesto for The Washington Post that painted her as a kind of Lady Liberty in a veil.

Undoubtedly marketed to the American political infrastructure, she wrote: “My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.”

She went on to state her belief that the struggle between moderation and extremism is the most important issue facing Central Asia, all Muslim nations, and the entire world today. She was right about that.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Bhutto had more in common with Western leaders than a mere facility for the English language. She was tailor-made for American-style politics in her iron grip of the superficial.

She was beautiful, impeccably educated, and had a brand political name by the standards of her country. (Her father was also a leader of Pakistan, though he left office swinging at the end of a rope.) In other words, she had the one trait universally admired by those who make their living from the public payrolls. She was electable.

Though Mrs. Bhutto piques our sympathies for her positions, for her courage, and for her grisly death, she may in fact offer us a glimpse of what we don’t want in our democratic leaders.

She was removed from office by two different Pakistani presidents for “corruption.” Mrs. Bhutto and her husband are alleged to have stolen more than $1 billion from the Pakistani people.

For democratic principle to survive, it must offer clear and better alternatives to fascism and religious fundamentalism.

Here in the United States, the standard bearer for democracy for more than two centuries now, we tend to see ourselves and our process as superior to the circuses we observe elsewhere. But just look at our slate of candidates! Vey’z mere.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a serious candidate primarily because she’s riding her popular husband’s coattails. And the jig may already be up on that. Barack Obama seems to be on a one-man quest to show the world how superficial we really are, as he now leads his party with no experience other than as Oprah Winfrey’s pet.

The Republicans aren’t much better. They offer us a B-minus actor, Fred Thompson; an American Taliban, Mike Huckabee; and a potential wife collector who was named after a baseball glove, Mitt Romney.

We need a philosopher king who can articulate the advantages of freedom for all people, everywhere in the world. Is that really so hard to find?

Now that Christmas is over, maybe Santa Claus is available for the job.

I went there in the mid-1980s to study philosophy and seek my own holy grail. I wanted to find out if goyish girls could be as decadently bosomed as my father’s 47 maternal aunts, but without the wrestler’s arms that tragically afflicted these flowers of Jewish femininity.

I was sad to learn that some of the college girls, despite their elevated status in the majority culture, also had beefy biceps. The emptiness of that left me only with the sad truth that I had chosen to go to school with very few of the Chosen.

Chestertown, the college community, was a breathing anachronism. Even during that late 20th-century decade, the town whites lived in the most charming federal architecture you ever set eyes on, but the blacks rested their weary bones in plank dwellings that looked like they were slapped together by Jim Crow himself. A lot of these shacks still had privies in the backyards.

I felt like a metaphor there, one Jew, as all the Jews, wandering alone and misunderstood in a hostile world of equestrians, debutantes and superior golf courses. I had a far better chance of raising the dead than a minyan down there.

But now, all that’s changing.

While universities and colleges across the United States are becoming more hostile to Israel, Jews and Judaism, with their left-wing professors railing in academic papers and classrooms, Washington College is emphasizing its interest in recruiting more Jewish students.

“We’re eager to attract Jewish students interested in going to college at a secular school,” said Baird Tipson, Washington College president. “Jewish students can be comfortable studying here and maintaining their Jewish identity. We feel that they really add to the diversity of our experience and allow us to be reflective of the diversity of America.”

If there ever really is an Ashkenazic exodus across the parted waters of Chesapeake Bay, it will be thanks entirely to Roy Ans.  A New York-born physician and 1960s-era Jewish alum and current board member, Dr. Ans is fighting a difficult battle with macular degeneration and glaucoma, but he’s seeking to shed a great deal of light on many pupils.

“My motivation was simple,” said Dr. Ans. “I wanted any Jewish student going to Washington College to feel as comfortable as any other student.”

Through Dr. Ans’ tireless prodding, the school recently began production of a new recruitment brochure titled, “Shalom, Opportunities for Jewish students at Washington College.” This piece touts, among other things, the school Hillel chapter as well as its Chavurah, a fellowship organization that uses the town’s small but vibrant Jewish community to make up for its lack of a shul.

There are also a burgeoning number of classes on Jewish topics including, so far, Jewish-American Writers, Literature of the Holocaust, Jewish vs. Israeli Culture in Art, American Jewish Communities and Religion, and Society and Culture in the Middle East.

Dr. Ans himself has underwritten the Roy Ans Fellowship that provides a $2,000 stipend to a sophomore or junior of any religion who conducts a research project related to the Jewish American experience.

I have to warn you. The brochure they are producing also has a section touting “Alumni Mentors,” and one of them is Yours Truly. That’s right, they’re bragging about it.

Washington College is actually proud to have produced the man that produces this column. But don’t let that wreck it for you. Send your young Jew or Jewess there and, unlike Mrs. Gilden’s little boy, yours will probably turn out great. 

I am always amazed when the political commentator Ann Coulter manages to raise such a ruckus.

It’s not that she doesn’t say outrageous things. Clearly she does. It’s not even that she doesn’t have a kind of credibility. She’s written a few books with obnoxious titles and manages to get her morose face plastered all over cable TV.

But how can you take her seriously? She looks like a middle-aged giraffe stuffed into a teeny weenie little skirt that wouldn’t even be tasteful on Lindsay Lohan (or any other attractive woman two decades her junior).

But alas, that flimsy garment provides all the insight she has to offer.

Shortly after 9/11 she infamously provoked the entire Muslim world in her moronic syndicated column:  “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity,” she wrote.

Sage advice. Next, we’ll tick off China and make them all Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Recently she verbally assaulted the Jews. Speaking on the boring Donny Deutsch show she asserted that the Chosen needed to be “perfected” into Christians. This was actually the less offensive part of a bigger point that she was making — that America would be better off if we were all Christians.

Certainly, if Coulter had her way, we would be a nation with nicer home furnishings, indoor voices and a ham in every pot.

Anyway, since Coulter is considered a conservative voice, many on the left are finding a lot of joy in her stupidity. This is a shame since conservatism has clearly given us meaner individuals of greater consequence, real old-school Jew haters like Pat Buchanan.

Of course, putting so much energy into worrying about a publicity streetwalker is wasteful and causes us to take our eyes off the real ball here. First of all, if there is an American threat to both Israel and the Jews, it is not the buffoons on the right who are providing it. They’re too out of favor to threaten a fly.

The real problem for America’s Jews now is clearly on the left. The nation’s campuses are infested by termites. They’re grubbing on the beams and foundations of tolerance, eroding everything that once held the diverse country together. For every so-called liberal intellectual trying to gasbag the Jews to death, accusing them of controlling government, media and money in their boring essays, there are scores more who agree but won’t speak up because they fear the clandestine councils of Levites.

Since the Democrats are definitely going to win back the White House next year, this southpaw anti-Jewish hostility is worth looking into. Perhaps Jewish Americans wouldn’t have helped elect Jimmy Carter had they known in advance that he blames the Jews for Middle East tensions, or that he would hire anti-Jewish advisers like Zbigniew Brzezinski, or that he felt that the Jews were not pious enough.

Before we elect a president this time we should overlook the fact that they were once married to a president, or that they’ve got Oprah’s endorsement.

Instead we should try to divine what they really think about the Middle East and understand where they believe the blame really lies. We should find out which academics and career government officials they will hire as advisers, and then examine their views. We should flat out ask them if they believe that there are cabals of Jews behind the media.

There’s going to be a lot at stake for the Jews and the world in this next American plebiscite. We need to know how the leaders we are about to elect, the leaders from the left, really feel. To achieve that we should waste precious little time debating the ignorant babblings of a pogo stick in a miniskirt.