When's the last time you heard a politician take a stand that goes against the media's current view of a particular issue? For example the press is all over professional baseball because of the use of steroids, and the politicians are taking every opportunity to get their mugs on television fifteen times a day decrying the use of "growth hormones" in sports. And now we learn that Congress has set up a committee to call players, owners, and union reps to Washington to testify before them regarding some kind of new regulation on baseball, when it is none of their business. Never mind that members of that particular committee have at one time or another complained about, and campaigned on, "over-regulation" when that regulation might have interfered with some pork-barrel spending in their districts. Politicians lust to hold hearings on the use of steroids in professional sports for one reason only, it is an easy, if trivial, way to grandstand, while the real needs of the nation, like health care and medical research, go to hell-in-a-handbasket. The politicians don't have the courage to attack the real problems. Anyway, we already have enough laws on the books to deal with the drug problem in sports. So, what's going on here?

The relatively trivial "problem" of steroids and baseball players has interested politicians in Washington simply because it is being driven by a rapidly increasingly low grade "syndicated" media, especially television "news." There is nothing innovative in a Congress that's in cahoots with the powerful, near imbecilic, "popular" media. It's as if the weak willed Congress asks for direction from tabloid TV. It appears that our overpaid politicos ask the media, "Quo vadis?" ("Wither goest thou," in forcing public opinion?) and after the media gives them the scent, our politicians recklessly, for the nation, join the media, like mindless dung-faced piglets chasing a squealing sow. Are we becoming a country with powerful punk "talking heads," but puny politicians? What's happening when our politicians allow their judgement to be co-opted by opinion polls and TV "news" tramps, and "celebrity" wenches?

At the risk of sounding too "academic," and with the full knowledge that quoting a historical source will provoke annoyance in the gifted, as well as the challenged, minds of those who hold breakfast opinion seminars at McDonald's and McCormick's, I must nevertheless rely on Tocqueville, from his 1835 book, "Democracy in America." The young French nobleman, after studying and visiting many areas of the America of those days, wrote that the democratic danger is the "enslavement to public opinion." The young aristocrat found it not only odd, but eventually unworkable, that the common man should be left with the decision as to what to vote for as right or wrong for our new nation. His argument was that the "masses" of most nations are ignorant and unschooled in the use of reason, and therefore would likely end up selling their votes for short term gain. Tocqueville thought that without a strong opposition of ideas, the majority would always win, and that would eventually create a new dictatorship: the tyranny of the majority. Of course that oppression by the majority was taken care of in our Declaration and Constitution, and our marvelous court system, and the rule of law in our great country. Even the majority must yield to the law of the land. In theory, at least.

One hopes that someday a politician, like the late Huey Long, the "Kingfish," used to do, will spit in the eyes of media- mogul-public opinion manufacturers, and express an honest to God opinion of his own, and let the chips fall where they may. For example, it would be encouraging to hear an Atlanta, Georgia politician say that it was madness to allow a petite, gun toting, 51-year-old physically unfit and apparently an untrained grandmother/deputy sheriff to be in a room alone with an un-handcuffed allegedly dangerous felon, who had been caught in the same courthouse, earlier in the week, with "shanks" in his socks. It would have also been healing to hear the sheriff of the county confess that he was (1) Too ignorant of the dangers in a courthouse filled with felons to be trusted with the safety of the court, or (2) Too derelict in his duties to remain the sheriff. What we got was the sheriff's pleading, "I've only been in office for two months." That's no excuse. He was no stranger to law enforcement requirements in the courthouse. Four outstanding servants of the people are dead, partly because of his negligence.

Of course, I know that the sheriff's incompetency appears larger because it's been a week made infamous by more than one murdering psychopath. From Chicago and Wisconsin to Georgia we've been symbolically covered with blood. And, while all human life is valuable, there have been some lives lost these past days and weeks that amount to a clear and present danger to our nation.

Some murders have significance beyond family tragedy. I write here of the attack on the courts. When a judge and officers of the court and staff are murdered, or assaulted, or threatened, those acts become attacks on our nation, and on us, and everything that we stand for as free people. We must not forget that the murder, or assault, or threatening, of just one judge is a personal attack on the liberty of all of us.

Finally, the deepest law of responsible politics should be freedom organized. Our courts, where justice for all is pursued, are the guarantors of our collective and individual freedoms. And, after our churches, a court of law is the most sacred venue in this great democratic experiment that we have named, under God, The United States of America.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.