It’s pretty pathetic when a Kennedy is too drunk to drive into the Potomac. After the visibly intoxicated Rep. Patrick Kennedy crashed his car into a police barrier near the Capitol just before 3 a.m. last Thursday morning, he explained to the police he was rushing to the Capitol for a vote, a procedure known on the Hill as “last call.” (It could have been worse: Patrick’s designated driver that night was Ted Kennedy.

At some point in his scrolling list of excuses, Kennedy eventually claimed he was addicted to prescription drugs and checked himself into the newly opened Kennedy Wing of the Mayo Clinic. He explained he had been “sleep driving.” If people fall for that, his father, Ted, plans to attribute his 1965 immigration bill to “sleep legislating.”

Coming right on the heels of a three-year witch-hunt directed at Rush Limbaugh for an addiction to prescription drugs (because of his politics), as well as the continuing threat to put Tom DeLay in prison (because of his politics), you would think there would be at least some discussion of prosecuting the young Kennedy for his addiction to prescription drugs, too.

Perhaps the Republican attorney general in Washington needs to interview Palm Beach’s Democratic prosecutor Barry Krischer, who wasted three years and untold taxpayer dollars trying to get Limbaugh, about the danger to society of prescription drug addiction.

Baseball has a system to protect batters from being hit: If your pitcher hits one of our guys, our pitcher will hit one of your guys. This is also the only argument that ever works with Democrats.

Democrats adored the independent counsel statute — until it was used to catch an actual felon in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton. Suddenly, they noticed all sorts of problems with the law.

Democrats swore up and down that women never lie about rape — until that same felon was credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick on “NBC News,” as well as four other women, all card-carrying Democrats, who described being raped by Clinton in strikingly similar detail (stories told in Christopher Hitchens’ book “No One Left To Lie To.”

Conservatives will continue to be threatened with prison on trumped-up charges until Democrats start having to worry about their being prosecuted for minor offenses, too. Kennedy’s case is not as minor as Rush Limbaugh’s offense, which never involved smashing his car into a police barrier. (In Rep. Kennedy’s defense, at least he didn’t drown the woman in his car and then hide for nine hours.)

Democrats have declared war against Republicans, and Republicans are wandering around like a bunch of ninny Neville Chamberlains, congratulating themselves on their excellent behavior. They’ll have some terrific stories to tell about their Gandhi-like passivity while sitting in cells at Guantanamo after Hillary is elected president.

For a political party that favors defeating foreign enemies, Republicans can’t seem to grasp that concept when it comes to domestic enemies. When battling liberals, instead of taking a page from Sun-tzu’s “Art of War,” American conservatives prefer the Jimmy Carter unconditional surrender strategy.

Republicans don’t have to become dangerous psychotics like liberals, but they could at least act like men.

According to Hollywood, this nation is a cauldron of ethnic hatreds positively brimming with violent skinheads. So why hasn’t the former spokesman for the Taliban matriculating at Yale been beaten even more senseless than he already is? Where are the skinheads when you need them? What does a girl have to do to get an angry, club- and torch-wielding mob on its feet?

There is not the remotest possibility that a man who was recently defending shooting women in the head for wearing nail polish will so much as be snubbed on the Yale campus.

The only violence on college campuses these days occurs when people like me and David Horowitz show up to give a speech in defense of America. Then we need bomb-sniffing dogs and a lecture hall lined with armed police. But a Talibanist goes about his day at Yale unmolested.

Conservatives may shrink from confrontation with howling, violent liberals, but as General “Buck” Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove” informed the milquetoast president still hoping to avert a nuclear confrontation with the Russkies: “Well, Mr. President, I would say that General Ripper has already invalidated that policy.”

Well, I would say liberals have already invalidated conservatives’ “Let’s all just get along” policy.

The political violence and threats of imprisonment have already begun. Now the only question is whether conservatives will choose victory.

COPYRIGHT 2006 ANN COULTER

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