During the heyday of our Republic’s more exacting youth, when the circumspection of men who would rule still pointed in the direction of prudent liberty, the apologetics of vice could gain little traction once the rug was turned back, and the sanitizing light of truth laid bare an errant Heart of Darkness. Yet, if we fast forward a mere blink of the eye, to a time when Mr. Alinsky and a host of political reprobates have captured the moral imaginations of an elite assembly of dwarves, the high stakes acquisition of dominion has become an irresistible command unto itself. And in answering such a command, measures that are more Nietzschean than Nixonian have propelled liberalism down that proverbially road that is paved with the body count of its good intentions.

And in the pursuit of those ends, nothing so trivial as a semen-encrusted Oval Office or a scheme to launder Madame Defarge’s foreign blood money can anymore raise a liberal’s eyebrow in disgust. Corruption has always been endemic to fallen man. Nevertheless, under the Obama administration, the institutions which oversee justice have become so polluted that the ambiguities of moral intent, and not action, have become the new selective standard by which the contemporary notions of right and wrong are adjudicated. In the vulgar dialect of our 21st century, and without the least whiff of irony, this is what passes as due process for the pilgrimage of the Progressive.

How far such corruption is advanced upon the body politic can best be illustrated in an answer from Samuel Johnson to Boswell:

We cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him; but the Judge will order you to be hanged. An alleged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice.

If "intent" now becomes the selective prism through which justice is apprehended, then any number of crimes can slip through liberalism's eye of the needle. In truth, this new caricature of justice is delivered with the winking of an eye. It is a rancid vintage offered in new wineskins; that "old injustice" decked out in its whorish regalia of power.

Of all the spurious doctrines of mankind, only the dogmas of liberalism and the collective would insist that their heroic intents be weighed proudly in the moral balance, even to the utter exclusion of their deeds. This is especially poignant when we are reminded that liberalism is a faith consisting wholly of good intentions -- a temporal gospel worshipped by its foolish and wretched millions. How seductive is liberalism’s catechism of benevolent intent, which delivers its largesse of purloined crumbs while relentlessly advancing its insatiable program of consolidated power through an excrement-clotted back alleyway. How deftly it has learned that any number of soothing tyrannies can be spoon fed to its “children” when mixed with the morphine of dependency -- so long as they are administered with a condescending hug, a banal racial platitude, and a hectoring of those who dwell on the opposing banks of the River Covetous.

In this new science of politics, the delusion of entitled expectations can offer the wicked a dozen reasons why their choice of questionable means will in fact serve the greater end, and why the necessity of shoehorning heaven into the world requires the judicious bribe, the parsed word, or the creation of schemes that bloom only in the shadows. Among the truly blind, there will be injustice, but as Anthony Eden reminds us, “Corruption never has been compulsory.” The greater sin is not the hypocritical evils a man or woman give assent to for their own sakes, but in the curse it brings to bear through its hellish example. If the breaking of eggs is understood as providing the salutary blessing of personal wealth and power, as well as birthing its own political new modes and orders, this lesson will not be lost on those who wait in the wings. Politicians whose pragmatic moralities spin like weather vanes do not need to be told twice that a new sheriff is in town.

The old adage, “You will become what you hate,” is instructive here. Hillary learned well from the secretive and paranoid example of Richard Nixon: her reluctant spiritual father. However, in their dance of give and take, the “daughter” has emerged the true master: relegating him to the status of piker because he had not enough foresight to see the Golgotha the young Turks were leading him to, and too much of a conscience to play the hardball that would have effectively driven America into two warring camps. And if some of the men who surrounded Nixon retained enough of the old guard worldview to crack through his stone wall, the zeal of the “daughter” and her coterie of true believers would see to it that nothing as effeminate as an upright heart would throw down liberalism’s grim stronghold of American transformation. Indeed, the Progressive’s Stalinist morality, restrained only by the lip service that collectivist power politics owes to the rapidly fading memory of Constitutionalist America, would condemn its own dear mother to the showers for a dose of Zyklon B before it allowed something as frivolous as honor or a damned soul to stand in the way of its glory.

Liberalism’s collective is a corruption of the dream of justice. Those who administer its sacraments cannot be greater than the master they serve, and they are what they are because they have abased themselves before a nocturnal vision where the rule of law is clouded with asterisks of blood. That these high priests might unwittingly be performing the last rites for such laws may not be lost on them, but having travelled so far down the rabbit hole, it is easy to become upended in the darkness. As an instructive case in point, shall we not meditate on the knowledge that ambition and inordinate desire produces its own moral vertigo: that affliction that induced a once young and talented woman to hitch her star to a sexual predator in the service of political idolatry?

In the end, selling oneself is little different than selling one’s inheritance, or selling out one’s country. The only detail to be haggled remains one of price. In passing from the world, be forewarned that a wealth of good intentions will count for naught as we stand one by one before That Perfect Justice -- with no excuse or ideology to shield us from our own rank self-deceptions. Having been discharged from the fawning accolades of dead men, what will it profit us as we trudge cursed and unattended down that broad and gently sloping unmarked path towards our own terminal destinies?

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He invites your correspondence at arete5000@dslextreme.com and at www.stubbornthings.com.