We have heard Obama blathering for so long about seven million sign-ups to the Affordable Care Act being a sure sign of success that, like the audience at a magic show, we have fallen for the misdirection that is the secret of every magician’s sleight-of-hand.

To begin with, we are being asked to ignore the fact that millions who have signed up used to pay for their own health insurance before ObamaCare forced their policies to be ruled null and void. Next, we are asked to ignore the fact that a large percentage of those people being counted haven’t even made their first payment and, therefore, aren’t actually enrolled. And, finally, we are asked to overlook the fact that, initially, we were told that 40% of the new sign-ups had to be young and healthy — the so-called invincibles — the latest estimate is that the number is closer to 25%.

Still, even if we go along with their numbers, we are still left with a question that nobody connected to the current regime has answered. Namely: what’s the big frigging deal — to channel my inner Joe Biden — about seven million? When Obama, Pelosi and Reid, were shoving this humongous suppository up our collective tuchis, they insisted it was to insure the 40 million people who had no health insurance. So even if they have seven million signed up, and even if we don’t drive the point home that this law forced six million policies to be cancelled by the end of 2013, seven million only represents a mere 18% of those 40 million.

For such dismal results, it would take a moron like Obama to invalidate the patient-doctor relationship, cripple the nation’s economy, hurt small businesses and up-end a health care program that worked just fine for the overwhelming majority of Americans.

It is poetic justice that Obama not only earned Liar of the Year honors for constantly fibbing about people’s ability to retain their health insurance and their physician, while simultaneously saving $2,500-a-year, but his arrogant intransigence is likely to cost his party control of the U.S. Senate.

It was clearly unconstitutional for Obama to change the Affordable Care Act by executive fiat more than 40 times. But it was just plain dumb of them to suggest that extending the deadline for those people who were allegedly in line to sign up was the same as allowing people to vote past the official deadline if they were already in line at their polling place. What they have chosen to overlook for obvious reasons is that only one day is allotted for voting, whereas people had six months in order to enroll in ObamaCare.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is at it again. This time, they’re marshalling their demonic forces to kill a documentary, “Honor Diaries,” devoted to depicting violence against women in the Muslim world. This is violence that takes the form of female genital mutilation, so-called honor killings and the forced marriage of little girls to mature, often elderly, men.

Predictably, CAIR’s first success took place at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, where they managed to get a scheduled screening cancelled.

Because the spokesmen for CAIR are always well-dressed and well-spoken, it is easy for some people to ignore its ties to Islamic terrorist groups, such as Hamas. Whenever they decide Islam is being portrayed in a bad light, no matter how factual the portrayal happens to be, they declare it “Islamophobic.” And America’s pinheads can always be counted on to cave, justifying their abject cowardice by calling it religious tolerance.

CAIR is not the first gang of thugs to employ intimidation in order to silence honest criticism. Before America entered World War II, the German American Bund, Hitler’s spies and devotees in this country, used the same tactics against those who dared to suggest Nazi Germany wasn’t a land of peaceful shepherds and lyrical milk maids.

Iran has announced that they will be sending Hamid Aboutalebi to New York to be its ambassador to the U.N. The fact that Mr. Aboutalebi was one of those behind the hostage-taking gang of Islamic blackguards in 1979 has many people in a dither, which is perfectly understandable. But I feel they are taking their eye off the big picture. The question isn’t whether he should be allowed to take his seat at the big round table, but why are we still hosting and subsidizing such a vile bunch of schmucks.

The U.N. is filled with the likes of this miserable Muslim terrorist. The only two things its members ever do is accuse Israel of committing crimes against humanity and deliver bogus jeremiads about global warming, whose main purpose is to turn America into a third world nation.

Just in case you were wondering who Obama has in mind when he speaks so glowingly about the international community, without whose participation we can never move against Syria or Iran, and who, he feels, are deserving of the last word when it comes to our Second Amendment, the Internet and the environment, the airhead is referring to the likes of China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Indonesia, Pakistan, Laos, Afghanistan, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and Turkey.

These are not nations with whom we should be sitting down, seeking either their counsel or their approval. They simply do not belong in a gathering of civilized nations. Frankly, where they belong is in a textbook devoted to toxicology.

The Churchills: Ward & Winston

In my book, “67 Conservatives You Should Meet Before You Die,” one of the questions I asked of all my subjects, who ranged, alphabetically, from Ablow, Keith, a prominent psychiatrist, to Zucker, David, a famous screenwriter-director, was which eight people who had ever lived, they would invite to a dinner party.

Being conservatives, it wasn’t too surprising that two people who would never have to pay for another meal if they ever showed up ready to tie on the old feedbag, were Jesus Christ and Winston Churchill.

I have a feeling that if I had, God forbid, interviewed liberals, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and even the phony Indian, Ward Churchill, would have wound up with a lot of meal tickets. Although perhaps by this time, Ward might have to give up his seat to make way for that other phony Indian, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, at the big pow-wow.

Still, I think that when trying to get a handle on the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans, you won’t go wrong if you compare how those in either group feels about the two Churchills, as does the regard in which the two groups hold, say, Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton or, for that matter, God and Barack Obama.

Speaking of he who has managed to yank the title of Worst President in U.S. History from the grasp of Jimmy Carter, the one thing you have to admire about him is that he’s never content to rest on his withered laurels. Instead, we get to watch him go public with his predictions in the NCAA basketball tournament while Vladimir Putin rolls his tanks into the Crimea and his Russian cohorts tweet insults in America’s direction. Obama certainly gives “March Madness” a whole new meaning.

Frankly, it was something of an eye-opener for me. In past years, when he made his tournament selections, I assumed he was tossing a bone to his base – the young and stupid, which sounds like the name of a soap opera. But this year, because of what the Russian bear has been up to, he has convinced me that in what passes for his mind, a college basketball competition really is more important than the fact the world is perched on the precipice of what could be World War III.

As for what’s happening in Eastern Europe, a friend sent me the following: “The U.N. Security Council is deeply concerned with the situation in Ukraine. The reason being that so far, no possible reason to blame Israel has been found.”

Even if I were to bang my head on something, knock myself out and wake up thinking I was a Democrat, I’d like to think I would question how it is that Barack Obama can keep taking multi-million dollar vacations, only to come back in time to lecture his guests at $35,000-a-plate fund-raisers about the horrors of income inequality.

When you get right down to it, if poor people didn’t exist, the Democrats would have had to invent them. In that respect, as well as others, they resemble drug dealers who are constantly turning dummies into addicts.

Finally, I don’t often send emails to people I don’t actually know unless they write to me first. So, although radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt is a subject in my book, “67 Conservatives You Should Meet Before You Die,” I’ve never met him. We conducted the interview via email.

But the other day, after listening to his show and one of his usual pleas for charitable donations, I sent him the following message:

“Dear Mr. Hewitt: You are obviously a good man, but these food drives you regularly conduct seem to be pointless because there is never an end to them. Has it ever occurred to you that instead of constantly trying to provide food for the needy around the world who can’t feed their own children, you might consider promoting birth control?

“On one of the spots, I recall you mentioned a woman who had six children she couldn’t feed. I understand that the children already exist, but the fact remains that there are Americans who might like to have six children or two or even one, but don’t because they know they won’t be able to support them.

“I hate the idea of children starving in Haiti and Guatemala or anywhere else on earth, but your food drives put me in mind of the line from the Bible about the difference between giving someone a fish and teaching that person to fish. You don’t even try telling them how to bait a hook.

“I’m not trying to get you to stop what you’re doing, but you’re not really addressing the main issue if you don’t at the same time get serious about the major cause of the problem. And that doesn’t happen to be the generosity or lack of generosity of your listening audience, but the irresponsibility of people in Third World countries who choose to place their own desire to have or at least make babies over the wretched lives they’ve doomed those babies to endure. Regards, Burt.”

So far, I’ve not heard back. But just in case those of you who haven’t yet delved into “67 Conservatives” were wondering, the eight people Hewitt would like to dine with are Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, Augustine, Augustus, Disraeli, Churchill, Washington and Lincoln.

Burt’s Webcast is every Wednesday at Noon (A change from 1PM) Pacific Time.

Tune in at K4HD.com His Call-in Number is: (818) 570-5443

©2014 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com.