Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 18, 2011

Politics is almost always an effort by power-seeking people to carve out self-serving exceptions to the Golden Rule. Democracy is the art of inducing victims of government power to focus on the question of who controls the government, rather than what it does. H.L. Mencken underscored that sobering truth with his deathless aphorism that democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it ? good and hard.

Appropriately, some of the supposed beneficiaries of Washington?s humanitarian slaughter in Iraq understand this principle far better than most Americans.

Speaking with a Reuters reporter in a Baghdad barbershop, Iraqi resident Wael al-Khafaji pointed to the military checkpoint just a few feet from the business ? one of hundreds scattered across supposedly liberated Iraq.

?Do you see this soldier in this checkpoint? He can do whatever he wants to me right now and I can't say a word. Is this democracy? What democracy are you asking me about, when my basic rights as a human being are stolen? If this is what Americans mean by democracy, let it be damned."

Americans should ponder those words as military-style checkpoints and similar police state measures proliferate across our own country.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.