The American Spectator

has this exchange with the security guard who requested her arrest: br> /p>

GUARD: Exit, exit, exit. Lady, I’m not going to tell you again.

OBERWETTER: I’m just…what did we do?”

GUARD: Exit. Exit, now…

OBERWETTER: What rule are we breaking? It’s against the rules to dance?

GUARD: Yes it is. Read the sign inside the memorial. It says quiet.”

OBERWETTER: I’m standing here being very quiet.

GUARD: You’re dancing in here. That’s disorderly.

br> The camera then tracks away from as Talley has an exchange of his own with a guard, only to return, not quite a minute a later, to the site of Oberwetter being handcuffed against the columns, the statue of Jefferson looking down on the scene.

Skeptics are free to question what was said in that last minute, though witnesses reported the only additional question Oberwetter posed was “why?”

But assume the worst. Assume, upon being approached by an agent of the state and given a patently ludicrous instruction, she was less than perfectly respectful or cooperative, perhaps a bit irritable or even abusive. Ought that be grounds for arrest?

In 2008, apparently, it is. Citizens now routinely grant police the same broad latitude in the exercise of power normally reserved for baseball umpires. Walk on eggshells. Show utter submission. Don’t dare question any direct order. Anything less than that, and you could find yourself locked in a cell.

Jefferson himself observed, in his Preamble to a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, “experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

Now, there’s a sentiment truly worthy of a memorial.