was a one-time liberal, before I grew up and learned something. I was certainly not in the same class as today's liberal-leftists in the Democrat Party and I always (OK, usually) get a good laugh at the extremes to which the lib-left goes nowadays.

Take, for example, the new Communist-Democrat mayor of New York City, €progressive€ Bill DeBlasio.

Even prior to his November election, he courageously announced he would rescue hansom carriage horses from their involuntary servitude hauling tourists around Central Park. If implemented, DeBlasio's rescue plan would send dozens of carriage drivers to unemployment lines and probably consign their well-tended horses to glue factories or cans of Alpo.

As with all €progressives,€ the mayor regards misplaced charities as more important than the well-being of human beings.

Both pre- and post-election, De Blasio made it vividly clear that he considered the highly-effective NYPD policy of stopping, questioning, and frisking suspected criminals constituted racial profiling and was racially discriminatory. On assuming the mayoralty, he banned the practice, ignoring the reality that stop-question-frisk mainly benefitted blacks in black neighborhoods by getting dangerous miscreants off their streets.

Liberal-leftists proudly and invariably favor criminals's rights over the rights of law-abiding constituents.

Ever-faithful to his campaign promises, last week the new resident of Gracie Mansion launched his threatened war against what are by far the best alternatives to the miserably-failing New York City's public school system, charter schools. Those alternatives also happen to be the bane of De Blasio's most avid supporters, the National Education Association and the New York State United Teachers.

DeBlasio, the NEA and the NYSUT oppose and despise charters because, by virtue of their educational achievements, those schools accent the failures of public school systems and the mayor is counting on the products of those schools to (God forbid!) reelect him in four years.

Last Thursday, De Blasio scrapped former Mayor Bloomberg's green-lighting of two new Success Academy schools and a third that wanted to expand, effectively leaving hundreds of mostly black, impoverished kids without a school to attend in September.

As Eva Moskowitz said after she was advised that the city's €progessive€ mayor had pulled the rug from under her charter school and from under all charters, €This has to be the saddest day for the Success Academy's [Harlem] children, family, teachers, school leaders. Right now, our kids are being evicted. Evicted out of their school. It's wrong and we need an explanation. You're going to have to ask Mayor DeBlasio what the motivations are.€

Ms. Moskowitz surely must know DeBlasio's motivations: They are identical to the goals most of his ilk, including President Barack Hussein Obama, namely to continue dumbing down America's kids so they won't feel superior to kids in the Third World.

Unfortunately, the jOKe - if it can be called a jOKe - is on €progressives€ and the rest of us since the third worlders are already rapidly catching up.

But, then again, isn't worldwide equality the aim of all Communists?