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Our political environment these days is so far off the beaten path that it's lost all capacity to shock - and we aren't referring to the two leading Presidential candidates being a criminal that, polls show, most know to be a liar and a blowhard businessman with no political experience and few rational policies if any.
No, in the debauched democracy that is the modern United States, that was always going to happen. When the culture's highest accolade is the anointment of celebrity - that is, someone who is famous merely for being famous, not for any actual merits or accomplishments - it's but a small step to judging leadership quality on celebrity standing rather than requiring any trace of objective reality or accomplishment.
What's amazing isn't the choice that apparently lies before us. What's astounding is the brilliance of the man whose choice lies behind us - none other than Barack Hussein Obama.
America has had incompetent, wicked, even traitorous executives before. James Buchanan's vacillating incompetence created the situation where he neither negotiated a settlement with the South nor prepared the country and army for war, resulting in a much longer and bloodier Civil War than had to be. Vice President Aaron Burr was arrested for treason in 1807, though he was acquitted on a technicality. Ulysses Grant, though a great general and a decent man personally, so surrounded himself with crooks and corruptocrats that his administration all but collapsed. And of course there is Richard Nixon, who taught us that the coverup is worse than the crime.
Yet all these men, for their faults, had moral limits they were not willing to cross. Unlike Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr never took up arms against the United States. Gen. Grant did not intervene in the prosecution of his cronies. Even Richard Nixon could have hung his minions out to dry and escaped impeachment or perhaps ordered some shady corner of the CIA to arrange for a convenient accident for those involved. He did neither, and paid the price of forbearance.
Why did even these miserable leaders retain some degree of moral decency? We can't know their hearts, but it's hard to imagine that there wasn't a deeply-felt loyalty to the Constitution and our republican system of government. Yes, although they became consumed by lust for power, or failed to wisely use the power entrusted to them, they never set out intentionally to destroy or harm the United States of America or deprive us of our rights wholesale.
For two hundred years, Americans have slept soundly secure in the knowledge that the Constitution protects our liberties. We have a right to free religion speech and press; a right to keep and bear arms; a right to be secure in our persons and our property; and many more. These rights are so ingrained in the American consciousness that it's easy to take them for granted, forgetting that they are, in fact, tremendous privileges that are exceedingly rare across the grand sweep of history.
And with the presidency of Barack Obama, our vaunted Constitution stands exposed as a sham. From front to back, it is merely sound and fury signifying nothing.
The great genius of President Obama is that he realized what none of his predecessors could see: that the only power the Constitution has is what each of us gives to it.
So what if the Constitution says absolutely nothing about abortion, or the power to compel citizens to buy health insurance they neither need nor want? The President and his judicial allies have made it so over many years, and no power can stop it.
Who cares if the Bill of Rights supposedly protects us from "unreasonable search and seizure"? Our government - not just Mr. Obama, alas - has decreed that we are all subject to the most invasive of searches if we have the temerity to want to board an airplane, the Constitution notwithstanding.
What of his refusal to follow common sense and stop Muslim immigrants dedicated to our destruction, or violent criminals from other backgrounds, which existing Federal law grants him the power to do? Again, the Constitution ensured that he took an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution," but he has discovered that there is no power existing which can force him to actually live up to his oath.
Yet for all that, these offenses still seem far away. Obamacare is an egregiously expensive travesty which will lead to many untimely deaths when costs get too high, but it's just money, and money most people never even see anyway. Even with America's Muslim population growing by leaps and bounds, terrorism is still a vanishingly unlikely threat to any individual citizen. The price will be paid far down the line, and most likely be paid by somebody else, so we ignore it.
Last week, Mr. Obama took the next step of intrusion, which we should have seen coming. Americans apparently don't mind if their wives and daughters are molested in full public view before their very eyes, so why would anyone carp at the government making similar acts possible in the false privacy of a public women's restroom?
For that is exactly the meaning of the Education Department's preposterous decree that all public schools must permit people to use whatever restroom they choose regardless of their plumbing.
This dictat transparently has no basis in law. It references a law passed in 1972, when homosexuality - to say nothing of transsexualism - was illegal nearly everywhere. There is no possible way that one single Congressman who voted for that law had the slightest inkling that it should, not just permit, but indeed require a complete inversion of existing restroom policy any more than Jefferson, Adams, or Franklin expected that the Constitution they had written would guarantee a right to abortion.
None of this matters. Mr. Obama has the power, and there is nobody willing to stand in his way.
Or is there? At this writing, 12 states have risen up in staunch refusal. North Carolina has sued to demand that the Federal government not discriminate against them with federal funding because of that state's new law requiring everybody to use the restroom matching their actual gender. Thus far, the funding threats have only worked against liberal states which would have sided with perversion anyway.
Now, it's an objective fact that there are vanishingly few unfortunate souls who are suffering from such severe mental illness as to be unsure as to their gender; and, there are even fewer even more unfortunate souls with a medical condition leading to legitimate confusion on the matter. So, for any individual person, it's quite unlikely they'll ever encounter a genuinely deluded individual in the wrong loo unless they live in San Francisco or New York City.
It's also, thankfully, very rare to find a predator who's willing to resort to drag to further his assaults - though they do exist, contrary to the media narrative.
But anyone can understand the threat presented by a man in the girls' locker room, or the potential chaos engendered by a woman in the men's. It doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to envision the inevitably degrading consequences.
Or at least you'd think so, yet there's no shortage of national politicians espousing this lunacy. Is America suffering from some unknown contagious mental disease?
In fact, it is: We are suffering under the communicative virus of secular humanistic leftism. Only a truly demented person could possibly believe that people are naturally good, that the Religion of Peace is aptly named, or that men can be women simply by saying so, and vice versa.
Instead of confronting this dementia, though, we treat it with respect and deference. Why? Is there truly nothing that can enrage the American public to the point where they'll actually require change no matter the cost?
Perhaps the popularity of the bombastic Donald Trump is a cry for help? Although he himself has no particular problem with transsexuals, he's also said that the individual states should be able to decide. Maybe he's actually read the Constitution, and unlike our current leaders, actually cares about it as more than a bathroom accessory?