The gimlet eye.

THERE are two kinds of laws: Mom Laws, and Dad Laws. Mom always wants to regulate, control, and pass laws about every single second of human existence. Mom Laws are things like, "Never go out without a muffler, even if you're in a hurry." Or "Never make anybody feel bad, even if you don't like him." Or "Don't take the library book off the shelf unless you really want to read it."

Dad, on the other hand, wants to control nothing. Anything is legal to Dad, as long as it doesn't cause immediate death. "Got a new rifle, son? Well, just don't point it at anybody's brain." And if you try to force Dad to pass a law about something, he'll do everything he can to avoid it.

"Dad, the kids are playing football in the street again. What should we do?"

"By golly, I did that when I was a kid."

In other words, Dad never sees the need for a law, and Mom always sees the need for a law. So Mom and Dad do this tug-of-war that keeps us from having no laws (Dad's way) and also keeps us from having so many laws that we can't breathe (Mom's way).

In America, today, Mom is winning.

I first noticed this when I was riding in a subway train in New Jersey, and saw a sign that said, "Smoking on this car is SELFISH and ILLEGAL." Wouldn't the word "illegal" be enough? Why did they use the word "selfish." Because it's a Mom word! It explains the reason for the law. Not smoking on the train is not just the right thing to do. It's part of your education as a properly trained human being.

Then this city in Minnesota passed an Anti-Staring Ordinance. If someone is walking down the street and you stare at em too long, you can be arrested. This is definitely a Mom Law. It proceeds from the ancient Mom Dictum, "It's not polite to stare." Take this law to Dad, and he would say, "Did you stare somebody down, son? By golly!"

The best evidence that Hillary runs the White House came last year when President Clinton held a news conference to announce something that made all the network newscasts and the front page of the New York Times -- namely, that he wanted to get rid of teen smoking.

Teen smoking?

Did I hear this right?

I mean, it's not like anybody has ever been in favor of teen smoking. I think the Moms of the world have been telling their teenagers not to smoke for about, oh, a hundred years now.

What's really scary about this is that Clinton . . . is a Dad. Doesn't he know that his job is to tell Chelsea, "Well, if you're gonna smoke, just don't smoke too much"?

But the ultimate example of Mom Triumphant came a couple years back when a guy in New Jersey got hauled into court for whacking a rat with a broom handle. The charge: "needlessly killing a rodent." The Goody Two Shoes Lobby: the Newark Humane Society.

Welcome to the era of Rat Rights.

I would think that, if any city would be happy to get rid of rats, it would be Newark. But it wasn't killin the rat that bothered the Enviro-Nazis. It was not letting them decide how the rat dies. You're supposed to wait till they get there so they can decide whether to "put the rat to sleep" with lethal injection, or "set it free in a nature environment."

Here's what happened. A 69-year-old man caught a rat eating his tomato plants, caught it in a live trap, called the Humane Society to come pick it up. But when they didn't come right away, the rat escaped. He clobbered it with the broom. And he ended up charged with a crime.

IT turns out he was in the middle of a peculiarly American controversy. Condo associations all over America were arguing like crazy over whether to use "glue-board traps" to get rid of rats and mice. All the rat-lovers hate em because it takes too long for the rat to die.

The alternative, they say, is to use cats. I'm sure the Rat Chamber of Commerce loves this idea. Don't put us in a cruel prison, they're thinking, where we slowly waste away. Let us be eaten alive, crushed by the ruthless jaws of a monster ten times our size.

Now my personal rat weapon of choice is a baseball bat, because there's nothing like that "splat" sound when you score a direct hit, especially to the rat cranium. But if I ever get caught by the Rat-Rights Police, I know exactly what I'm gonna say.

"I had to do it. The rat was about to eat a cockroach. I saved the cockroach's life."

After all, if we're gonna be humane about this, let's be humane about it, okay? Let's kill every species that tries to kill any other species. Let's see, how many species would that be?

I believe the answer is: "All of em."

Listen to me, people. They're rats. They deserve to die.

Anyhow, the man charged with rat murder was eventually hauled into court, where a judge found him not guilty on very narrow grounds --that the rat-rights law conflicted with another law governing animal life in New Jersey, and therefore his responsibility when confronted with a rat on his premises was vaguely defined by the Legislature.

The judge, you can plainly see, was a mama's boy.