I come from a world and time when you could deeply disagree with someone else — on politics, on religion, on social values — and still could be good friends. I don’t know otherwise how, as a deep conservative, I could have made it through four years of Columbia University back in my mid-1970s college days. Frankly, I don’t know how the Lefties otherwise could have survived me through that quadrennium either. In fact, they actually elected me to represent the entire undergraduate student body in the university senate. My politics they did not like, but they wanted a fighter in the senate to press for reduced tuition hikes. It would be two college representatives against more than 100 others. Sometimes bread has to be buttered.

It is sad to see what the Left has become. They are so obsessed with their cancel culture and need to cheat and change rules. They can’t just sit back and accept that they undeservedly have the White House, have held the House a bit longer, and almost have the Senate. That’s not enough. They can’t just accept that, if they could get their own act together, they actually could accomplish more of their agenda. Instead, they look for enemies to destroy. Better to curse the darkness than to light one candle.

If they had run a capable Democrat for president — I dunno, say a Grover Cleveland or a Harry Truman or even a Walter Mondale — and if they had sent a quasi-competent Veep in with him like a Hubert Humphrey or heck even a Walter Mondale, they might have accomplished something, though not good. Instead, they sent in the last man standing — to the degree that he even was standing during most of his basement campaign where he Zoom’d with the likes of Cardi B. They paired him with Kamala, even worse than pairing a robust California Zinfandel with a light tuna salad, or oily fish with a red wine heavy in tannins. Then they let him loose from his handlers, and he suddenly went “Squad” and pursued an Ocasio-Tlaib-Omar agenda that subverted everything he had promised about unifying the country.

He blew up the southern border after Trump had negotiated nifty agreements with Mexico and others that prospective immigrants wait in their native lands. Undocumented kids back into the Obama cages. He stood behind the new critical race theories being taught to kids. Issued executive orders about single-gender bathrooms and supporting male-bodied athletes in female sports. Closed down the Keystone XL pipeline, turning us from a net exporter of energy to a desperate buyer needing even to tap our emergency strategic oil preserves. Blew up the economy, now at 7 percent and rising stratospherically. Evacuated Afghanistan disgracefully with images reminiscent of Lightfoot’s Chicago on a Saturday night or Mosby’s Baltimore all other nights. One could almost hear an ISIS or Taliban scout on the Kabul Airport tarmac asking “Jussie Smollett, I presume?”

As of today’s writing, 28 House Democrats have thrown in the towel. Some will be taking the little soaps and shampoos back home with them. At this rate, and since Liz Cheney and Kinzinger will be gone also, I may not have anyone in Congress left to write about in another year except, maybe, for Ocasio’s dress designer. What’ll she wear at her next thousand-dollar-a-plate gala? “Tax the Witch”? Pelosi won’t be House speaker next year and probably will be interfacing more with gravel than gavel.

The Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for the mess they have imposed on their own prospects. Instead of playing by rules, as Trump did when he accomplished enormous attainments from his Day One despite the Russia Hoax and his challenges facing an obstructionist opposition that brazenly called themselves “The Resistance,” the Democrats immediately set about to make Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia states. Cuba and Venezuela would have been next, but their four prospective new U.S. senators presumably had been executed or had switched teams and sought haven in Florida.

And then the filibuster.

Look, we all hate the filibuster when we have the 50.01 percent majority. Had it not been for the modern filibuster — which requires 60 U.S. Senate votes in an upper chamber of 100 — Trump could have gotten so much more of his agenda. Reagan could have, too. And so could have the guys on the other side.

The filibuster is quite a weird political animal, but its super-majority requirement does tamp down extremism. It compels accommodating the opposition, at least a bit, and thereby stabilizes policy. Otherwise, a country could see-saw every four years from one radical extreme to its antipode. A bit of Democrat moderation easily can win over a Romney, a Murkowski, a McCain. But to reach 60, they have to moderate a bit more. And they sure can — if they want to.

Truly, is there no issue on which Democrats and Republicans can work amicably together? Build better infrastructure? Upgrade worn-out roads and bridges? Stand up to China espionage, trade violations, and other cheating? Improve policing methods? Protect social security? Oppose Putin seizing Ukraine?

Instead, the Democrats fixated on avoiding compromise by busting up the filibuster. With a bare House majority that flips on six seats and an evenly split Senate, they irrationally internalized they had a mandate for radical change. Alas, two comparatively quasi-principled Democrats stood in their way, one a somewhat tough West Virginian guy, Joe Manchin. He is no hero, but he continues to seem resolute where most politicians buckle.

And then there is Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Although “misogyny” is a Democrat buzzword, there never has been as overt a case of public contempt for the female of the species as the campaign to destroy Sinema. It is personal. It is vicious. It is blunt anathema that is not bland heat but blind hate and blonde hate. They never would do that to a guy, not even to a sex-changed guy who had transitioned both ways. But they have decided that she is the high-pitched, estrogen-niched weak link. All it should take to get her vote to kill the filibuster is to destroy her, to “break her.” (READ MORE: Kyrsten Sinema Is the Latest Victim of Democratic Radicalism)

So, like the misbehaved at the cinema, they follow Sinema to the toilet. Think they would follow Manchin to the toilet? He would flush their brains out the other end where the moon don’t shine. So would any guy with pronouns that do not include “she/her/hers.” But here is the Tweet of the Year from a professional at liberalism’s repository of compassion, the American Civil Liberties Union:

“She sounds like she is going to cry. . . . We’re breaking her, keep going.”

Wow. So the ACLU has not got a clue. That’s from Sarah Michelsen, an ACLU senior campaign strategist and former state director of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential campaign in 2020. Not enough that “[w]e’re breaking her.” But we gotta “keep going.” We’re almost there, folks: she cannot micturate in private, can’t void or evacuate in peace. What’s left?  Swipe the toilet paper? Disembowel her? Scaphism? To gibbet her? Might die if she is quartered, so maybe only eighthed or sixteenthed? Not enough? Give her season tickets to the New York Jets and then, after the scaphing, feed her to fire ants.

Yes, that is what American democracy is in the minds of the Woke who see a January 6 riot as “insurrection” and would suppress Hunter Biden laptop reportage from social media. They would turn our democracy into a torture chamber. Although I am no fan of Kyrsten Sinema, I find myself respecting her for standing and thereby breaking her political assailants.