That genius, Saul Alinsky, never figured on failings of character making a botch of his notorious Rules for Radicals. Or did he?

The characters of Alinsky's two most accomplished acolytes, President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are in the national spotlight. Both are in a lot of deep do-do these days.

You see, that coke-bottle glasses-wearing dweeby little Capone Mob hanger-on that Saul Alinsky was never said or wrote much about the character required in a radical to make his rules work. Why? Because no one with standup character could ever engage in the amorality and venality that comprises Alinsky's shabby brownshirt, Marxist agitator, mobster rip-off tactics. Saul was a small ball artist -- a street-level tactician (read: penny-ante hood, pamphleteer, and political hustler). Big thoughts weren't much Saul's bag.

Character wasn't core curriculum in Alinsky's radicals' how-to. Questions of character were pretty much out of bounds for Alinsky, who had as the summation of his career a book touting an anything goes approach to achieving ends. Besides -- a big besides -- Alinsky was a nihilist at heart -- a hateful, petty, destructive toches whose middle name should have been "Schadenfreude."

Nihilism -- that may be the key to this whole discussion. Hold that thought a sec.

Character does count -- a pinch of it, anyway -- even to the purveyors of Alinsky's menu of subversive tactics. Alinsky's movement doesn't want Boy Scouts. Nonetheless, Alinsky's destructobots need a smidgen of character so that greed, arrogance, and conceit don't impede their razing of America.

That brings us back to Barack and Hillary, who, in slightly different ways, are character defective, so abundantly that maybe -- just maybe -- they'll lay themselves low through the Benghazi scandal, the abuse of IRS powers (Barack), and the Justice Department's infringement on press freedom (Holder and Barack). Alinsky's bag of tricks may not suffice to pull Barack's and Hillary's heinies from the fires engulfing them.

As American Thinker Editor and Publisher Thomas Lifson wrote about Mr. Obama last Wednesday:

To a remarkable degree, the biographical narrative he [Mr. Obama] offered to the media when he suddenly appeared on the national scene, and which they accepted and aggressively defended, was built on illusion. Serious questions about Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, his authorship of Dreams from my Father, and his academic transcripts once were rudely brushed aside as racism and paranoia.

And one might add, Mr. Obama's long relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a world class hater and race-baiter, par excellence. Pity that Reverend Wright is black. He would have made a swell Grand Dragon.

Of course, Alinskyite Barack and his handlers did what they needed -- with the assistance of the mainstream media -- to gussy up Mr. Obama's bio and image (a tactic that Saul would have greatly approved, since he was a champion of destroying the establishment from within). Barack Obama, Ivy League success (on merit), accomplished academician, and peace and love activist and politician, free from left-wing extremist involvement, was and is a useful lie, a phony's creation. Suckers are born every minute, which is an unwritten tenet of Alinsky's credo.

For Mr. Obama and his Alinsky fellows, it's one thing to sport a mask to gull voters and whoever else needs gulling; it's another thing to get caught up in the web of your own lies.

Barack Obama has fallen prey to his own and his handlers' propaganda; to wit, that he's a Nubian sun god come to earth to minister to the little people. His reasoning and decisions are as unerring as a pope's (ex cathedra might be inadequate to describe Barack's authority, though, since it originates with himself and not the office). The president was cocooned and nurtured by race-based preferences from his adolescence on. He came to adulthood primed for hubris. And hubris -- well, hoary hubris, it may finally be a-coming for Barack.

Ditto Hillary. Hillary's rap sheet dates back to the early 70s -- at least -- when, as a callow lawyer, she wrote a fraudulent brief for the Watergate Committee. She, along with her lyin' and a-cheatin' used car salesman-of-a-hubby, have conspired to cover up Bill's lurid extramarital assaults; they've cheated in bank deals, and she in a cattle futures deal. The Whitewater scandal earned federal investigations and unwelcome adverse national publicity. And when anyone got in Bill's or Hillary's way, either or both were and are more than willing to waylay the offender (ask Billy Dale about Hillary's body slam).

Hillary hasn't relied on image as much as a reputation. Hillary is a tough broad willing to break knuckles, jaws, arms, backs, or whatever bone happens to strike her fancy, to get what she demands. She'll lie, maneuver, stonewall, and connive. Hillary's slipped the noose so many times now that she must feel nearly invincible. To Hillary's mind, she's got the battle-tested talent, skills, and chutzpah to outfox and outmuscle her detractors -- with the mainstream media as backup for good measure.

But Hillary's wings can melt, too, just like her buddy Barack's. Conservatives who think Barack and Hillary are immune to the consequences of their actions aren't accounting for vanity and overreach as killers. That and the confluence of events.

Let's walk back a little bit that Alinsky didn't account for character in his Machiavelli Lite teachings. This from a Playboy interview with Alinsky shortly before his death (via the Daily Kos):

But over and above all these devices, the ultimate key to acceptance by a community is respect for the dignity of the individual you're dealing with. If you feel smug or arrogant or condescending, he'll sense it right away, and you might as well take the next plane out. The first thing you've got to do in a community is listen, not talk, and learn to eat, sleep, breathe only one thing: the problems and aspirations of the community. Because no matter how imaginative your tactics, how shrewd your strategy, you're doomed before you even start if you don't win the trust and respect of the people; and the only way to get that is for you to trust and respect them. And without that respect there's no communication, no mutual confidence and no action. That's the first lesson any good organizer has to learn, and I learned it in Back of the Yards. [Italics added]

Well, well. The smugness, arrogant, and condescending part Alinsky got right. Winning people's trust, correct. But for a man who bruited any means -- centered on lies, deceit, and mischief -- no one can indefinitely hold people's trust; eventually you must enslave or kill them. For Barack and Hillary, combining the aforementioned character flaws with lies and underhandedness laid bare, then you have the stuff of unravelings.

Too optimistic, you say, about Barack and Hillary having a date with a fall? Perhaps. Then, again, Alinsky, that old deceiver, dedicated his Rules for Radicals to Lucifer, the Father of Lies. And the nihilist that Alinsky was, perhaps his unspoken intention was to bring everyone and everything down, not just conventional America. But Saul had to scam some people that he was for more than destruction.

The Father of Lies, the Nemesis of God and Man, no doubt heartily approves Alinksy's methods... and the results that will ensue if successful.