In the old days, along with such colonial powers as France, Spain, Holland and Germany, England indulged in what you might call unenlightened self-interest. The prevailing practice was to gut their colonies in Asia and Africa of all the natural resources they could get their hands on while the folks who mined the coal, picked the crops, and dug for the diamonds, lived in abject squalor.

It may not have been nice, it may have been selfish and even brutal, but it made perfect sense. When some English noble stoked his fire, he probably never gave a second thought to the Welshmen suffering from black lung disease; so long as he was toasty, that's all that mattered to his lordship. So far as he was concerned, Wales might as well have been on the other side of the moon, and, truth be told, its people were of less concern to him than his hounds.

I'm not condoning such behavior, but it's reassuring when even bad acts are logical. For instance, it makes sense to rob a rich person, but not a poor one; sense to knock over a bank, but not a fruit stand.

Which brings us to liberals. They perplex me, not merely because I believe they are wrong about virtually everything, but because they don't even seem to dwell on the same planet as the rest of us. If we were to discover one day when they all took off in a large spaceship that they were merely tourists from another solar system, or perhaps criminals who'd had to serve their sentences on this distant penal colony, I might be as shocked as everybody else, but I wouldn't be too surprised.

For instance, consider Homeland Security, if you will. Does it make any sense that Americans, in the wake of 9/11, would carry on as if eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or monitoring their library books marked the end of civilization? Are liberals so unaware that there are millions of Muslims who want nothing more or less than to exterminate all of us infidels? Do they regard Islamic fascism as just another offbeat political faction, sort of like the Green Party? All I know is that they seem like lemmings who, not merely satisfied to go off the edge of the cliff themselves, are determined to take the rest of us with them.

Do they honestly believe, as they so often say, that they regard evangelical Christians as a greater threat than Al Qaeda; that they think that the Palestinian suicide bombers and the so-called insurgents in Iraq are very much like this nation's forefathers? It's obvious that I didn't read those portions of the history books that dealt with Washington's sawing the heads off English civilians and Jefferson's massacring school children in London.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a liberal, and to have self- righteous blowhards like Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd and Charles Schumer, speaking for me. And then I wake up screaming.

When these two-bit politicians do their best to trash men ten times smarter and a hundred times more decent than they are -- people like Charles Pickering and Samuel Alito -- twisting their words and actions in order to portray them as racists and poltroons, why is it we never hear a single prominent liberal rise up and say, "Finally, senators, have you no shame?"

How is it that a totally undistinguished Pennsylvania congressman named John Murtha can achieve overnight canonization in the liberal media by demanding a deadline for the withdrawal of the American military from Iraq -- a deadline which can serve no other purpose but to demoralize our troops and encourage our enemy? And if you have the effrontery to question the congressman's judgment, you can count on being reminded in no uncertain terms that Rep. Murtha served in the military. Yes, he did…a very long time ago. However, for the past 30-odd years, he has fed off the public trough just like all those other lay-a-bouts in Washington.

But even if he had only mustered out of the service the day before yesterday, lots of people do a much better job in uniform than in mufti. Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, Curtis LeMay and James Stockdale, all come to mind. Besides, military service hasn't anything to do with civilian decision-making. In the case of Murtha, who hasn't been on active duty in 38 years, it's clearly a case of that was then and this is now. France's Marshal Henri Petain, let us not forget, went from being a French war hero in 1919 to being head of the Vichy government, and that was just a scant 21 years later.

In making my point that times change, and so do men, I'm not suggesting that Rep. Murtha is a traitor or is any less patriotic in his heart of hearts than he was four decades ago. But I, for one, sure wouldn't mind seeing him escort Ms. Cindy Sheehan aboard that spaceship.

You can learn more about Burt and his latest book, Conservatives Are from Mars (Liberals Are from San Francisco) at his home page. Write Mr. Prelutsky at: