If one were to look at a pressure or temperature gauge, the red line situated towards its outer limit indicates a zone of danger or consequence if that boundary is broken or ignored in a concerted and repeated fashion. No machine can long withstand nor hold to its functional integrity if such warnings are flouted and the long term viability of such an abused mechanism would be a poor bet at best.

In a republic such as we enjoy in America, a document that serves as a moral-political red line in securing human freedom is currently under assault by those who would destroy and remake our unique reciprocal relationship between ruler and ruled. The Constitutional covenant we have reverenced for over two centuries, a reasoned and wise explication that maximizes ordered liberty and restrains the accretion of power away from the unaccountable hands of the few, is under assault by forces that wish to reshuffle the deck and reorient the starting points of that fundamental relationship. And in tinkering with the assumptions that undergird our Constitution's organic sanctity, the impassive majority does not yet perceive that a red line as wide as the Rubicon has been crossed to the detriment of the Founder's design for liberty.

In these latter days of the republic, a conservative is surely the equivalent of a bristling prophet sounding in the wilderness, calling the people to awaken and repent. But like so many seers, they are deemed retrograde or mad for their efforts in attempting to resurrect an ardor for a world that many believe has long expired. Meanwhile, the forces of Progressive Social Evolution, who never sleep in their efforts to remake the City and the Men who inhabit it, have turned their backs on anything which smacks of the arcane past and instead push on in their project towards the homogenization and taming of humanity. However, while swimming against the relentless waves of "progress" (generated by these legions of a Post-Modern political architecture) seems at times to get us nowhere, we are nevertheless buoyed and animated by that inconvenient and unassailable knowledge in the fulcrum of our hearts that our quest is just and our vision of an ultimate political and moral reality is true.

Aside from the ideologues who would reorder laws and men by political fiat, the mass of American citizenry are incognizant of those constitutional red lines that are overstepped. Having been charitably termed "low information voters," they have been shepherded, coaxed, and fluffed by the siren's song of safety and security for so long that they believe that those now ancient liberties that their fathers labored and prospered under were myths of a Golden Age. How much more simple to place one's faith in the irresistible embrace of the metastasizing state, which after all exudes the confidence of science as opposed to the ethereal whimsy of inalienable rights flowing from an invisible god in the sky? Knowing little save what is broadcast through the seductive organs of the regime's "Ministry of Truth," a population that has been educated just enough to believe that it has attained an understanding of immediate self-interest, has in fact become as long simmering frogs boiling in an iron cauldron.

Oblivious to what has been lost in their exchange for an illusory security, much of America is opaque to the incremental power shift that has been occurring just below their field of vision. Having been told that Universal Health Care is their generation's great panacea, they are clueless to the byzantine regulations and the choices that they have surrendered to a system that can only give them an equality of long queues, rationed goods and services, and shared misery. Having been sold the bill of goods that banning a type of weapon or lowering the capacity of an ammunition clip will save our children from the ravages of monsters, these great Masters of the Human Mind are impervious to the real motivations underlying the wicked imaginations that spawns such evil deeds. The Progressive heart, having reduced all life into an expression of the material, forever sees existence in a perverse or backwards form: illegitimate profits suppress the evolution of better healthcare; weapons rather than jaundiced or nihilistic minds commit mass murder; poverty begets crime rather than the vice versa; and the damnable lie that the State is the economic powerhouse by which wealth is created.

Can it be denied that sleepy minds dreaming of diversion and pleasure choose not to see beneath the Trojan horse of governmental largesse while luxuriating in their incrementally heated sauna? They wonder at all the fuss exhibited when private businesses or religious institutions are threatened with the coercive arm of force to abandon their aggrieved consciences and to lend their labors to the attenuation or destruction of nascent life. They shrug their shoulders to the instrumental "noble lies" that assure them that only their rich and fat neighbors will be taxed for the public weal or that the right for a law abiding citizen to possess a weapon that is efficient in a posture of defense or in holding forth against tyranny must be eclipsed in the interests of abstract rosy-cheeked children. In their glazed stupor, they are oblivious to the cacophony of executive orders that if implemented give the president the prerogative to commandeer the lion's share of America's economic and energy usage at his own utilitarian whim.

Indeed, Obama has deemed fit to bypass the Founder's intent of using the friction of government to subvert the tyrannical and capricious intent of illegitimate command. Separation of powers and checks and balances were constitutionally forged with the design of imposing a dilatory and reasoned motion into the schema of legislation. The imperial regime of Barack Obama has taken upon itself the task of tearing asunder the America of today from the crowning ideals of her Founders: therein setting the goal of transforming our nation's federally balanced minimalist system, which had already suffered enough, and replacing it with an intrusive busybody government that impacts nearly every facet of American life.

Obama's score of Executive Orders regarding firearms are just the latest rendition of tampering with the Constitution's braking mechanism for dampening unmixed power. Having used his Fourth Estate nomenclatura to gin up and exploit human tragedy, the Imperial Presidency has taken it upon itself to lay siege to the outer ramparts of the hallowed Second Amendment. It is in utilizing the agencies of the executive to bypass Congress and etch away at organic freedoms, through subverting the genuine spirit of Constitutional restraint, that the Progressives' hand is stunningly revealed for what it is -- no less than an unwarranted encroachment on Freedom in service to a vision that would shepherd men like clever beasts.

Under the Roman Republic, before it was subdued by the tyranny of the Principate, two Consuls were elected annually as magistrates of executive power. Under wartime or conditions of extraordinary impending peril, the Senate and councils would accede to the limitation of their authority for an agreed upon period of time to meet the demands of the state's emergency. One is reminded of Cincinnatus called from his plow to stave off foreign invasion, only to retire to his fields when the danger had subsided. With Executive Orders in hand, Obama uses his capricious agenda as a constitutional bludgeon while a compromised media assists in the efforts of covering his abject failures and carrying water for his ill-conceived machinations. Instead of working towards America's rejuvenation and salvation, he engages in: weakening America abroad, bolstering and arming our enemies, kicking our allies in the teeth, and in running the domestic ship of state over the abyss of monumental insolvency during a time when the republic is relatively at ease. Obama is no Cincinnatus. His executive orders instead serve to render us less free while his progressive blueprint advances power to the executive in levels unimagined by the Founders.

Unable and unwilling to do that which he has been duly charged, Obama seems hell-bent on putting his hand to that which he has no business and no constitutional mandate in attempting. While red lines are being crossed and gauges are exploding all around us -- all to the background clamor of chirping crickets -- the media organs jabber away in the grip of their torrid love for an ambitious demagogue who bridles no shame in exploiting his purloined advantage. Meanwhile, in the seclusion of their toasty living rooms, a bit over half the population are stunningly incredulous to the realization that we are well past poached.

Glenn Fairman resides and writes in Southern California. He appears as The Eloquent Professor @www.palookavillepost.com and can be summoned at arete5000@dslextreme.com.