Last year I hit the half century mark, and I know I’m not the only conservative who’s done so and taken the time, from time to time, to compare the way things were when I was growing up and the way they are now.

Of course we’ve advanced technologically, more so in the quarter century since Armstrong took that small step for mankind than we did in all the centuries that came before, but socially and politically we in America seem to have regressed in many ways, the changes engendered willingly by Americans – despite the fact that allowing this regression has damaged and continues increasingly to damage our country.

The regression I’m talking about is the decline of patriotism and love of country, the gradual abolishment of our morality, values and the relationship with God our founding fathers incorporated into the documents that have defined our great nation since its inception.

The source of the problem lies to the left of our political center, emanating from the once credible Democratic Party that has since allowed itself to be hijacked by liberals whose only goal seems to be to replace our capitalist republic, synonymous with the awesome success that has made us the richest and most powerful country on earth, with socialism, which has proven time and time again to fail its constituents through astronomic taxation and the removal of personal responsibility from individual citizens by forcing all citizens to carry the weight of a non-achieving and/or unambitious/unmotivated few while shouldering the blame for the failures, transgressions, laziness, stupidity, negligence and other shortcomings of the few.

When I was a kid back in the 1950s and 1960s, a Democrat (all the way up until Jimmy Carter’s presidency taught me the error of my ways) in a Democrat family, nobody in my household ever spoke as disrespectfully and derogatorily of a sitting President as Democrats do today. Comparing a President with Adolf Hitler would have been unthinkable to anyone with a patriotic bone in his body and pushing leftist politics on school children would have been the formula for both parental and administrative outrage leading to the dismissal of an offending teacher. Even with the outpouring of rage and hatred toward the government by the hippie movement over Vietnam and the draft and the support of same by the liberal media and a bunch of ambitious and feckless politicians, there was little if any invective of today’s magnitude advanced by said politicians or newsies. The pols and scribes won their battle – General Giap admitted after we pulled out of Vietnam that we were winning, and had it not been for this loud dissent from those politicians and the media, the North Vietnamese would have surrendered long before our withdrawal.

Certainly, public school faculties maintained the discipline not to preach personal politics to pupils who were there because they had to be, nor to echo the anti-war rhetoric of the left.

Now, thanks to the slow creep of liberal judicial and political influence, teachers’ unions and Marxist organizations like the ACLU being as powerful as they are, teachers like that Jay Bennish asshat are free to rain their farfetched, anti-American diatribes, unchecked, upon their students without restraint and still keep their jobs. Any parental outrage that occurs is all but swept under a rug as the liberal educational system gradually pushes parents’ say in their children’s educations out the door.

In school, we were also given the option of taking a moment for silent prayer every morning. No particular religion was endorsed and we were under no obligation to pray. Nothing was being forced on anyone, nobody was being exposed to anyone else’s beliefs.

Now, thanks to left wing judges, sleazy opportunistic leftist lawyers and again, the ACLU (also sleazy, opportunistic leftist lawyers), such prayers are illegal as they have been falsely branded as a “church and state” issue. It’s come to the point where the ACLU can successfully sue any public institution that sports the Ten Commandments or a Christmas message.

And of course, there’s the Global War On Terror: Muslim extremists have been waging war on our country in one way and another for twenty five years, give or take. They became emboldened during the Clinton Administration, when that President allowed them to commit terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies and one of our naval vessels with virtual impunity, and early into the Bush Administration they brought us 9/11. Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush responded decisively, first by taking Afghanistan away from the Taliban and helping promote a democracy in its place, then by doing the same in Iraq. He has strengthened our homeland security venues so that no further acts of Islamic terror have occurred, though there have been foiled attempts.

What say the Democrats?

Angry that Bush defeated straw man Al Gore in the 2000 elections and then went on to win a second term, beating John Kerry, the Democrats under their liberal masters have joined the “angry left” in placing anti-Bush politics over the well being of America and her citizens.

Knowing full well that Islamofascism poses what is probably the greatest threat to the safety of U.S. citizens in our nation’s history, they impede Bush’s defensive efforts on that quarter purely in the interests of attempting to make him fail. Democrat politicians rail against the Administration with irresponsible slurs and slanders, they make pronouncements that demoralize our troops in harm’s way and encourage our enemies to fight harder and terrorize more, they support the media when they print or broadcast secret defense data.

We can’t speak plainly and accurately without being censured for political incorrectness or accused of bigotry. A bunch of Muslims can blow people up, slice up a citizen for disagreeing with their views, burn hundreds of cars, vandalize, set embassies on fire in the name of Islam… And the media will bend over backwards to omit the fact that these crimes and terrorist acts were done in Allah’s name, by followers of Islam. At airports and other transportation venues, searching a dark-skinned Arab male who fits the profile of every terrorist in recent history is “racial profiling”, just to appease a few peoples’ sensibilities we have to ignore the natural suspects and search the more unlikely passengers, such as little old Caucasian grandmas and old men in wheelchairs, or preadolescent girls with Barbie dolls.

Had this country been under attack by a huge, well financed, globally based terrorist organization when I was a kid, had an attack the equivalent of 9/11 happened on our soil, the order of the day would have been “rally ‘round the President,” not “Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon/Ford lied, people died.” Our politicians, the media and most Democrats would have acknowledged that we were defending ourselves, that failure to support the administration’s efforts would result in Americans being murdered on our very streets.

Today, things are just the opposite.

The fact that Republicans have been the majority on the Hill since the early 1990s and have been gaining more power ever since renders the underlying victories of the liberals a paradox of sorts. They have woven atheism, socialism and PC into the fabric of our society and even now are twisting the Constitution around to interpretations that have little relationship to the original text. They have found the means to represent child molesters as regular Joes and made same sex marriage a front burner issue, just about turned our schools into anti-American, leftist propaganda institutions and vilified our primary religions while approving that religion which is practiced by people who want to kill us because we are “infidels.” They’ve obstructed the President’s national security policies in times of a serious threat to our country and enabled frivolous lawsuits to become as commonplace as a trip to the grocery store.

And the level of outrage we would have seen during my childhood years had such things even been dreamed of is simply not there, except among those of us who are informed and active on the conservative side.

Did I mention that there was some regression afoot?