In case you missed it, John Murtha said John McCain is too old to be president. Of all the lines I’ve heard during this political season, that’s the one I enjoyed the most. If you’re wondering why, it’s because of all the consternation it must have caused many of Mr. Murtha’s Democratic colleagues. There are, by actual account, 21 Democrats in the House as old or older than 71-year-old McCain. Charles Rangel is coming up on 78 and John Dingell is 81. I bet they gave Murtha an earful in the men’s room.

As for the Senate, although Obama and Clinton are younger than McCain, 11 Democrats are older. Some are much older. Warner is 80, Inouye and Akada are each 83, Lautenberg is 84 and Robert Byrd is 90. I can just imagine what Ted Kennedy, 76, and Dianne Feinstein, who’s just shy of 75, said when they got wind of Murtha’s crack.

John Murtha, by the way is 76! He’s just immature for his age.

In my lifetime, I have been aware of just a few cults that attracted major media attention. Mainly, they garnered a lot of ink because all of their members ended up dead. The first was the one led by Jim Jones down in Jonestown. That was the cult that managed to put Kool Aid on the front page. Next was David Koresh and his gang of wackos down in Waco. Third in line was Heaven’s Gate, as big a flop as the movie of the same name. They were the folks who believed that if they dressed all in white and killed themselves, they’d be collected in a spaceship and be flown off to a better place. And who knows? Maybe they were. At least they saved themselves all that packing and standing in line that I associate with space travel. Still, inasmuch as all of these cultists managed to wind up as dead as doornails, it’s hard to see the attraction. These days, we have the biggest cult yet -- the one led by the great and wonderful wizard of Oz, Barack Obama.

His followers would probably take exception to being regarded as cultists, but that’s certainly how they strike those of us who are on the sidelines watching them file by like mindless zombies. The things that Obama says are so out of sync with reality that the only explanation for his having a following is that they’re caught up in fanatical fervor.

For instance, he insists that he’s the one person who can bring Democrats and Republicans together, but during his two years in Washington, not only hasn’t he proposed a single bi-partisan measure, but he has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. Next, he claims he’s the fellow who can bring blacks and whites together, but he attended a black separatist church for 20 years, soaking up 1,000 Sundays worth of Rev. Wright’s verbal sewage.

But mention any of this to one of Obama’s worshippers and you either get one of those blank looks popularized by the Stepford wives or you’re called a racist.

That leads me to second a motion proposed by my wife. She thinks the word “racist” should be banished from the popular lexicon, along with the likes of chink, yid, wop, Polack and queer. People -- generally blacks and liberals -- toss the word around with impunity, labeling anyone who is opposed to affirmative action, entitlements based on pigmentation or even the prospect of Obama’s being elected president, as a racist. I say that in the future anyone caught using the r-word should be treated exactly like someone who uses the n-word. If it means that liberals will be tongue-tied for a while until they learn to expand their vocabulary, so be it.

While checking out the ages of 535 senators and representatives in Washington, I made a discovery that saddened me as a Jew. What I found was that of the 13 Jewish people currently in the Senate, 10 are Democrats and one, Bernie Sanders, is a self-described Socialist. As bad as that is, the situation is even worse in the House, where 28 out of 29 Jews are Democrats. All I can say is, Eric Cantor, of Virginia, must be one lonely guy at the annual Jewish Republican mixer.

As a conservative, I don’t mind Jews being the Chosen People. But when 39 of the 42 Jews in Congress are left-wingers, the problem, as I see it, is when Jews are the elected people.