As harsh as that variation on a theme might sound, it is more disturbing still that this has become one of the primary policy devices of the American left to advance their political agenda.

Most know the famous admission by Rahm Emanuel regarding a good crisis, but few of us can confess to the foresight to predict just how cravenly this overt policy of exploitation would come to be implemented. That it has been practiced at the expense of the populace and the security of our country is a fact, but the truth remains too distasteful for some to fully grasp.

The president does not mean well, and he is not trying to make things better. He is flooding us, overwhelming us, because constant emergencies require constant statist solutions.

From the very outset of the current administration, we have been treated to a seemingly endless eruption of crises, real and manufactured, which the president and his minions have manipulated with impressive skill and malice. From the financial crisis that mostly was to the health care crisis that certainly wasn't, and from the global warming crisis that never was to the gun control crisis that isn't, those who are still paying attention have been bombarded with manufactured societal emergencies on a near-weekly basis. It's as if our collective hair is perpetually on fire as we are herded from one catastrophe to another by those who do not wish us to focus more than a few minutes on quelling the flames.

When was the last time that either house of Congress held deliberative hearings, entertained debates, and accepted public input on the real problems of the day, and then set about to truly fix them? Instead, some "gang" of senators or representatives with questionable motives gathers in secret, at which time the gullible Republicans are routinely outmaneuvered by the Democrats, and the problems remain.

What turns the stomach more than almost anything we have seen in recent years, however, is a relatively new form of manipulation in our national experience: politicking on the bodies of the dead, especially children, or on the backs of their distraught parents. We have seen much that confirms for us a lack of decency or morals in our philosophical opponents, but nothing quite equals the conscious exploitation of the dead and grieving for political gain. Of course, "political gain" is a euphemism for "power," for what else is modern politics? It really is that simple, and that crass, as currently practiced.

Trayvon Martin was no child, so he had to become one for our emotions to be sufficiently piqued and our anger to be inflamed. Though there were current, accurate photos available showing his size, his tattoos, and his skill with sign language, those would not have advanced the political agenda. What we were shown were photos of a young child who had died at the hands of a mythical creature, the white Hispanic, and whose death could be exploited to advance a lie.

Such methods are ghoulish in a way that is almost embarrassing, from the perspective of traditional Americans. Our parents and grandparents did not behave this way. We who are repulsed do not wish to be associated as Americans with those who would stoop so low.

These are the depredations of the modern generation of the American left, and they bode poorly for any chance of discourse or advancement of anything that could be considered the common good. How, after all, do you meet in the middle with those who embody shameful profiteering for goals that promise only foreseeable destruction?

At the risk of being called cold and heartless, which one might consider a compliment coming from those of whom I write, I struggled with dueling emotions at the recent sight of the Newtown parents who lent their emotional weight, whether or not with full understanding, to efforts to betray the Constitution and punish Americans who had done them no harm, either in fact or in theory. On one hand, the losses suffered by these parents are staggering, and at the time of the tragedy, I prayed that all of those parents would have the strength and faith to overcome what had been done to their children and to them. Such a loss is beyond mere words.

But to see so many accept the transparently malicious exploitation of their loss, in the name of a political agenda with a generations-long history of caring nothing for tragedy, was infuriating, both for those who were unwittingly exploited and for the voluntary participation of those rational enough to know the use to which they were being put. Despite suffering a tragedy, is it not incumbent upon the grieving to at least understand the motives of those to whom they are lending their grief, and to what use it will be put?

There is perhaps nothing as pure as the grief of these parents. Yet, by offering it in the service of malice, do they not understand they have marketed that grief, and that their loss is now merely a commodity to be brokered by the left for profit? Do they not yet understand, despite the carcasses of those whose usefulness was spent by this president and his party, that they too will be discarded when their tears have been wrung for all the power and depredation they're worth? Are they so blinded by grief that they fail to see that the mission is not as lofty as the protection of children, but is merely the lawless disempowerment of the left's political enemies?

It is difficult to comprehend, in a society that is unused to constant malice, that the sort of people we used to consider opportunists and hustlers, and treat accordingly, are now at the highest levels of our government. From that perch, they work ceaselessly to implant their philosophy deep within the soul of this country, poisoning it from within. The moral void necessary to lie to grieving parents about the worth of their loss to advance a purely political goal, having already encouraged their misunderstanding of the illusory connection between the goal and their sadness, is too vast to measure. So, too, must be our resolve to defeat them. One day, we will look back on this amoral presidency either as the time of our salvation as a nation or as the time of our destruction. It is time to choose whether we are a people that honors the grieving or sells their tears.