Which makes sense, I guess, in a country where so many of your tax dollars go to grow the very government that molests you hourly in ways both big and small.

Time was, you wanted to be threatened and spanked, you put on a rubber gimp suit and ball gag and got bullwhipped by a butter-faced dominatrix like every other self-respecting rugged American individualist. You didn’t expect the government to put on the leather bustier. Adam Bitely, Net Right Daily:

Did you know that the Federal Government was spending taxpayer dollars on organizations that would lobby local governments to tax sugar and soda? Were you also aware that such activity is illegal?

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says she was aware of the lobbying activities but was not aware that is was illegal. A recent report from The Daily Caller showed that $230 million had flowed in obesity prevention grants to 30 states as part of the Communities Putting Prevention to Work Initiative. The program was established as part of the 2009 “stimulus” bill.

The report from The Daily Caller brought attention to the fact that some of the $230 million found its way to influence peddlers who lobby local governments for higher soda and sugar taxes.

As stated in Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Section 1913:

“No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose, by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy or appropriation …”

Clearly, HHS Secretary Sebelius and the rest of the bureaucrats involved in this matter are not familiar with the U.S. Code. Sebelius told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health that because the lobbying was taking place on the local level of government that there was no wrongdoing but announced that the practice is now prohibited saying, “The original language that has been part of the law that we have administered and had our grantees administering, applied to grantees lobbying the federal government.”

When the government is spending trillions of dollars by an untold number of bureaucrats this type of activity is bound to happen. Yes, it was illegal, but in a system so large and vast, it is not surprising that the Obama Administration turned their heads, looked the other way, and hoped no one noticed.

Rather than doing everything in her power to put an end to this sort of activity, Sebelius was unapologetic before Congress, acknowledging that she knew the illegal activity was taking place. Instead choosing to deny that using federal taxpayer money to lobby local government was illegal in spite of the plain language of the law.

What is or isn’t illegal under the Constitution is, to the professional Leftist, a matter of context: all is relative, and so much depends on whether you are caught, how much political power you have backing your play, and just how much you can rely on the mainstream press to insulate you from pressures arising from the wrongdoing.

If “Fast and Furious” or the Black Panther cases have taught us anything it’s that a public with a short attention span coupled to a mainstream activist press working hand in glove with the progressive movement, means that the consequences for truly abhorrent or unconstitutional behavior is pegged not to legal or parliamentary punishments, but rather to the degree of noise either raised or quelled by motivated and politicized interest groups.

To a professional ruling class that, as a matter of leftist ideology, cannot be truly shamed, all “morality” being situational and contingent (like “truth” itself), “ethics” are a quaint vestigial category for behavior that must be balanced against cost-benefit analyses, public polling, and a precise understanding of the political landscape. This will determine the latitude for the supposed ethics, and predict the likely consequences of straining them.

And with the institutional left controlling so much of the political landscape, either through direct elected power or through institutions or popular culture, relativism is the rule, and one can’t be punished for wrongdoing when wrongdoing is redefined as “things we can’t get away with.”

It’s a self-serving circular logic, sure. But then, logic and rationality are tools of bourgeois oppression. And so while they can be usefully appealed to when they serve a purpose, they no more constrain argument than would, say, something so hoary and old as a supposed fixed historical document signed by a bunch of dead White slaveholders and misogynists.