While my mother has won international competitions in creating empathy for herself, I have to feel a little bad for her right now.

She is in the adopted land of my people - Miami Beach - but is a bit of a second-class citizen.

"My son the managing editor" sounds OK. It's better than "my son the unemployed shoe salesman" or "my son the recovering meth addict."

But it pales in comparison to what she is surely hearing over early-bird dinners.

There is "my son the accountant" and "my son the lawyer."

And, at the top of the Kosher food chain ... "my son the doctor."

But I can send some solace her way.

I've come to realize that I am a doctor of sorts.

For this blog, forget my last name is Glantz.

It is Frankenstein ... Dr. Frankenstein.

Yes, I have created a monster.

It's name: Lisa Mossie.

I'm not saying Lisa looks or acts like a monster. She makes a nice appearance and is, by and large, a nice woman who works hard at her job and looks out for her family.

But get her behind a keyboard and she's downright frightful.

She has made it clear that her husband has politicized her and that I didn't "discover" her. Technically, that is correct. Columbus didn't "discover" America, either.

But, as I've written 10,001 times previously, I found her letters to the editor - mostly critical of yours truly - so entertaining that I offered her own column every other Thursday.

Her columns were so well-written that I offered her the chance to make it a weekly offering.

Since then, we've taken some cheap shots at one another - in print and on the air (Behind The Headlines is currently on hiatus as we retool, but it has nothing to do with the writers' strike) - but not let it get in the way of any kinship one columnist feels toward another.

And what I'm about to write isn't about lack of respect, because I still respect Lisa's point of view and will defend her right to express it. Moreover, being a writer-type, I think she is a heckuva writer.

The scary part is that she is so good at expressing it that some ideas many of us find downright offensive are so carefully worded they almost fail to register on the sensitivity meters she thinks should be unplugged across a nation already buried in narcissism.

Take, for example, her Jan. 24 column about what she believes to be the exploitation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream.

She took an overdue break from mentioning me by name, but it was clearly a response to my column on Jan. 20, which stated the dream has yet to be realized.

It is clear to me that Lisa is one of those right-wingers living in a self-imposed sheltered world and kidding herself that everything outside of it is A-OK.

Lisa is well-read, which comes out in her columns, but she leaves herself open because she reads selectively.

She and I do agree from time to time - like on Saudi Arabia and many quality of life issues - and one of those subjects is that issues of race should not be brushed with one broad stroke.

Lisa took a bold stance - one that rocked most in our newsroom, but not myself - on the Duke University rape scandal.

That's when a black exotic dancer accused members of the snow-white school's lacrosse team of gang rape.

Lisa saw early holes in the case and wrote about them in a column. She took some hits, defended her position and has ultimately been vindicated.

I know the feeling. It's a good one. Example: I get warm and fuzzy each time I look at the approval rating of President Lame Schmuck.

I never disagreed with Lisa on her stance on the Duke scandal, which was turned into a racial issue by a media frenzy when it was really the accusations of one woman who happened to be black.

But Lisa is now like one of those one-hit wonders from the 1970s - maybe Debbie Boone of "You Light Up My Life" infamy - who keeps going around trying to sing that same song, maybe to different arrangements, to anyone who'll listen.

Her recent attempt to fit her tired Duke argument into the situation in Jena, La., and then reach the conclusion that liberals need to grow up is nothing less than shameful.

Like she did when trying to support her flimsy case for Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, she is taking bits and pieces of information and framing them out of context to paint a picture where anyone who defines a liberal - i.e. keeping an open mind - is a fool's fool.

It could be that she was so ostracized in the days when other kids called her Lisette in school that she doesn't realize that almost every major event that happens in a middle or high school - from every fistfight, catty remark in the girl's room, election of the homecoming court, etc. - is ultimately connected.

This is particularly true when you are talking about a small school in a small and isolated southern town where the working class whites live and pray apart from the destitute blacks.

Lisa wants us to believe that everything that happened in Jena - including initially charging the black kids who beat up the "poor innocent" white kid with attempted murder, as opposed to the rightful charge of assault - was much to do about nothing.

She decries the fact that it became fodder for those of us who know that King's dream remains in limbo, going so far as to say that he would be turning in his grave.

The only thing that turns with a statement like that are a bunch of stomachs.

Except that of my mother. She's thrilled. Her son is a doctor after all.