Oh, I know what you’re thinking.

Because, as Dylan said, “I can see through your eyes, and I see through your brain,” and because I do, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking:

“Benjamin Kelly is a schmuck.”

Well, yes. In fact, he’s SCHMUCK OF THE MONTH for February.

Yes, Good Ol’ Boy Bennie Kellie, who worked as a district secretary for Florida state Rep. Shawn Harrison, a Republican (SURPRISE!) was fired because this Good Ol’ Boy sent an email to a Tampa Bay Times reporter claiming that two survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, “are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis when they happen.”

Now putting aside that he can’t spell, or doesn’t know, the plural of “crisis” (Hey, Bennie, it’s CRISES), I know what you’re thinking:

“Benjamin Kelly is a COMPLETE schmuck.”

Not so fast there, Lone Ranger. A schmuck, eh? (Hey, Bennie, it’s a New York Yiddish word). Well, let me tell you something:

Last summer, while visiting two relatives in New Jersey and sitting in the backyard, one of them decided to posit this:

“Those people going to all those rallies? They’re paid to go by GEORGE SOROS.”

My other relative said, “Oh, of course they are.”

I thought, “Hmmmmmm. I was at one of those rallies, a pretty darn large one in Boston with Kathy and Sara.”

Now, friends, I am willing to believe just about anything, what with having been the managing editor of Saucer News, the OFFICIAL organ of the Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society (Get it?) where we published four times a year but never on time because we drank in the office.

But I thought about the George Soros thing for a minute and I said, “OK, then, where’s my money?”

To which one of my relatives gave a puzzled look.

I said, “Well, if George Soros is paying people to go to rallies, Sara and Kathy and I were among the 40,000 in Boston and I didn’t get any money. I wasn’t even offered any money. Had I known Soros was going to offer me money to go, I would have waited for the money. THEN I would have gone. But nobody offered me money and I went anyway because, silly me, I thought a rally against racism and against racists was a good thing to attend, just as I think the upcoming (March 24, definitely in Portsmouth, probably in Wilton) rallies against gun murders, gun murderers, the NRA and its supplecants in Congress is a good idea but, hey, I’m not gonna go if they’re gonna pay people to go and forget about paying me.”

To which one of my dear relatives said, “Well, I don’t think he paid all 40,000 people.”

To which I said, “Then who the hell got the bread? Which ones? I WANT THEIR NAMES.”

To which they had no answer but I assume they were thinking, as Nixon and Erlichman and Haldeman thought way back when, “COMMIE AGITATORS!” Hmmmmm. Well, to quote the Chad Mitchell Trio in “The John Birch Society,” “If mommy is a Commie then ya gotta turn her in!” (My mother voted for Dick Gregory in 1968, so … maybe?)

So, you see, how dare we be so skeptcal of Little Bennie Kelly if, after all, two perfectly intelligent women in New Jersey think George Soros has to duke for the bread to get people to attend rallies? Clearly Good Ol’ Bennie isn’t alone. Should he share the title of SCHMUCK OF THE MONTH for February?

Maybe with this guy:

Last week, some guy called in to the Eagan and Braudie show on WGBH (yes, yes, YES. I listen every day between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. What? You think I have a life?) and said he was against banning assault weapons because he needed his to defend himself when the government came to take it away from him.

And Marjory Eagan asked him what good it would do him if the ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT was really determined to take away HIS assault weapon. He wasn’t sure, but he wanted to keep it anyway, perhaps fearing assault by an entire herd of rabid deer because, after all, assault weapons are fine hunting tools, especially if you’re too drunk to aim properly with the one bullet Robert De Niro allowed himself in “The Deer Hunter.”

Here’s how it would work:

“You in there! This is the government. Give us your gun.”

“No. You can’t have it. It’s mine.”

“C’mon, now, don’t be a putz. Give us the gun.”

“No. I warn you: I have a gun.”

“We know that. We want it.”

“No.”

“We have tanks and bazookas and, oh, look, here comes the Air Force.”

“OK, here’s my gun.”

But let us suppose, oh just for kicks, that there are many people in this nation who think that Benjamin Kelly is right and that the two kids who he saw interviewed on TV were actors who spend their time somewhere rehearsing for the day another mass shooting occurs so they can parachute in and cry on cue and threaten our not-really-a-constitutional-right to bear arms? (Remember the words “well-regulated militia?” Got one? And, yes, I remember the most recent Supreme Court ruling and I will stop kvetching about if you stop kvetching about Roe vs. Wade. It’s OVER.)

And let us suppose that George Soros is flying all over the country paying people (but not me, Kathy or Sara) to go to rallies against racism.

And let us suppose that YOU own an assault weapon and that RIGHT THIS MINUTE there are hundreds of government agents surrounding your house ready to rip it from your hot, live hands.

Then let us suppose that we can combine all three of these ideas into one giant ball of CRAZY.

Welcome to the United States of America, 2018.

Yeah, it’s kind of funny except that it isn’t. It’s ideas like these that keep this country from doing perfectly sane things like requiring licenses to own guns as we do to drive cars, or SEVERELY restricting access to guns that can be fired really, really fast and that can carry magazines with lots and lots of bullets so you don’t have to reload so often and maybe break a fingernail, or maybe have an age restriction. Can’t drink until you’re 21 but you can buy an AR-15. Ah, the logic.

Oh, and Bennie? It really isn’t funny to dump your stupidity on two kids who just saw their friends and teachers shot to death.

You’re right. We’re all right. Bennie is a schmuck.

SCHMUCK OF THE MONTH.