On Democracy

Democracy, the Emperor and his junta insist, is the cure-all panacea for the world's ills. The basis of this belief remains a mystery, however, given the Emperor's deficient understanding of history and admonitions from the founding fathers to the contrary.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
~ Benjamin Franklin

"We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy... It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."
~ Alexander Hamilton

"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
~ Thomas Jefferson

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.
~ James Madison

"The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived."
~ John Quincy Adams

"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
~ John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1801-1835

If there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide, what exactly is the goal for Iraq?