What is a Demagogue?

"One who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots!" H. L. Mencken

Hitler was a demagogue. Obama is not. Fact is, Obama gives the American people far too much credit for being intelligent, reasonable beings, when in fact there appears to be a large number that are -- in Mencken's words -- IDIOTS!

Let them keep their children home from school on Tuesday. Don't allow them to hear from a man who in spite of all the odds stacked against him, became the most powerful and respected man in the civilized world. Even right wing TV host Bill O'Reilly wrote an article recently about how much Barack Obama can teach our children.

But some parents of young school children are afraid because they have fallen under the influence of "demagogy" just as surely as if they had been standing in a stadium chanting "heil Hitler" seventy years ago. They've been told to fear Obama because he is different, that he is foreign, that he might fill their children with radical ideas, when those ideas are likely to be working hard and setting goals, perseverance, respect for one's parents, supporting the helpless, using reason rather than confrontation to eliminate conflict -- radical ideas indeed for a true demagogue because what he wants is control.

Demagogy has existed for centuries. There will always be those whose need for control outweighs the needs of the people. But the United State of America did not become the most powerful nation in the world because we were controlled; our power comes from our people and our respect for the individual and the rights of the individual. We have always emphasized freedom of the individual, including all the rights we believe in so deeply, but especially the right to think for ourselves. More than that, the individual freedoms that include free speech, freedom to believe in any god or no god and of course, political freedoms. Once we have abrogated those rights, we will begin to decline and it won't be because President Obama speaks to our children on a Tuesday after Labor Day. It will be because too many are allowing themselves to be manipulated by "demogogues" whose only goal is to control the controllable or as H. L. Mencken puts it -- preaching to a bunch of idiots!