Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr has secured the nomination of the Libertarian Party for president, and this news has no doubt has given the GOP a big case of agita.

“I’m sure we will emerge here with the strongest ticket in the history of the Libertarian Party,” Barr stated in his victory speech shortly after being selected as the Party’s nominee. “I want everybody to remember that we only have 163 days to win this election. We cannot waste one single day.”

…”We’re proud to present to the American voters Bob Barr as our presidential nominee,” says Libertarian Party spokesperson Andrew Davis. “While Republicans and Democrats will fight for their own power in November, Libertarians will fight for Americans. Bob Barr is one of the strongest candidates in the Party’s 37-year history, and we look for him to have an enormous impact in the 2008 race. Republicans and Democrats have good reason to fear a candidate like Barr, who refuses to accept the ‘business-as-usual’ attitude of the current political establishment. Americans want and need another choice, and that choice is Bob Barr.”

The GOP already knows John McCain’s support is soft (to be charitable) with the lunatic Base, so an opportunity to cast a protest vote is a real problem. Barr supported Bush’s drug war and authored the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 while a congressman; out of office, he’s reversed his position on those issues, as well as lobbied for the legalization of medicinal use of marijuana.

I decided to venture over to the swamps of Freeperland to see what the knuckle-dragging crowd thought of Barr’s nomination. It’s after the jump.
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This is from a comic commission by the George Wallace campaign for governor in 1960. (Hat tip.) For the slower (willfully and not) people out there, the rhetoric about protecting the innocent states from the all-powerful federal government—rhetoric that would have basically every stalwart Republican and Libertarian out there pumping his fist in solidarity—is referencing Alabama’s “right” to prevent black people from voting, with violence if necessary.

It’s important to have long memories, because the language about “small government” and “states rights” is with us today, and there’s no reason to think the basic meaning has changed significantly from the days when it was about stopping black people from voting. “States rights” dresses itself up as anti-tyrannical language, but it’s actually pro-tyranny. It’s about crafting a nation that makes it the easiest to use government power to override individual rights. Remember this picture every time you hear someone waxing on about the inherent nobility of “leaving it to the states”, because odds are they’re beating the same drum they have since the South lost their war to preserve slavery.

Ezra’s right; there’s something farcical about the knee jerk use of the word “nanny state” when you’re talking about children. The rhetorical device “nanny state” was developed to exploit a very specific set of non-subtly gendered anxieties—to make men especially picture a finger-wagging Mary Poppins that they could rebel against. “Don’t you tell ME what to do! I’m a grown man! I’ll eat all the toxic chemicals that I’m unaware are in my food that I want!”

But whining about the “nanny state” when you’re talking about the bona fide child care duties of the state—i.e. the right of the state to restrict the foods brought into the school to be sold or served the children—is puzzling. It really shows that “nanny state” is a code word that means, “In a conflict between public health and corporate profits, the latter should always prevail.” I’m guessing if it somehow started to conflict with corporate profits to teach children to read, libertarians would start howling “nanny state” about that. “How dare the nannies feed the children healthy food and teach them to read?!” It’s truly bizarre.

I do think there’s a limit on in loco parentis rights of a school, and luckily the U.S. Constitution enumerates the rights that I think should be respected on school grounds—cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and religion, etc., though there’s a certain reasonable amount of age-based restriction that should loosen up as they age on some of these. There’s no real reason to stock age-inappropriate books at an elementary school, for instance. But the rights that a student doesn’t relinquish on school grounds roughly correlates to those very things where citizens have strong disagreements that would necessarily mean that any school interference would be a genuine infringement on basic rights. Religious instruction in the schools, for instance, is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment right, no matter how much wingnuts try to get around it. But healthy food and the eating of it? There’s no constitutional right to junk food, nor is there any sane disagreement in our society about the fact that it’s better to eat your broccoli than a Twinkie. And as Ezra notes, if your child absolutely must eat nasty junk food at school, no one is stopping her from bringing it with her lunch.

What’s more insidious about this whining about federal school food guidelines is how the lack of these guidelines will disproportionately affect the poor. The lack of resources, both financial and geographic, for the poor to get good, healthy food has been discussed thoroughly here. Children living in that situation could really benefit from one or two nutritious meals a day at the school. So as usual with the pro-corporate “libertarian” nonsense, it’s not just about prioritizing corporate profits over public health, it’s specifically about prioritizing corporate profits over the health of people with a lower income. In other words, outright class warfare.

But I think we can all agree this is a problem that everyone, middle class or poor, shares. Everyone wants their kids to eat better, and they’re already bombarded with advertisements for junk food everywhere. When they’re out of your sight and at school, you can’t make them eat right. The school should be able to step in on behalf of parents on this one. It’s not just for kid health and parent peace of mind, either. It’s really unfair to teachers to load kids up on a bunch of sugary stuff at lunch so that they’re beginning their sugar crash phase when they return to their desks. It’s not just a nutrition issue, in other words, it’s a discipline issue.

I’ve read this post by HTML Mencken three times very carefully, and I still can’t figure out what his deal is. Leaving aside that he undermines his commitment to fighting racism by using the words “hobbyhorse” and “pet cause”—minimizing language, by any measure, only used to insinuate that the cause at hand is not, in fact, important—he does testily admit that racism is serious shit, but just suggests that the war in Iraq is a more important cause right now. Fighting the war and fighting racism are somehow in conflict? asks the usually intelligent but confused human being. Isn’t racism a primary cause of war-mongering? Isn’t the vast majority of energy left for this imperialist cause coming from screeching Muslim haters, now that every other remotely rational person has exited stage left?

Mostly true, but now that Ron Paul has joined the race, we should apparently soft-pedal his association with white supremacists because Ron Paul is against the war, and we need more people on the right opening up to the possibility of voting Republican and being against the war. Also, there’s the potential of Paul splitting the ticket somehow, or taking on a 3rd party run that splits the vote. Fair enough; HTML Mencken is not suggesting that Paul is anything but a slimy piece of shit who just happens to be against the war. The idea, I think, is to shove a sock in it about Paul’s associations with hate groups, neglect to point out that his political platform is straight of a skinhead/militia playbook of conspiracy theories about Jews running the world, and let moderate, anti-war Republicans think Paul’s the guy for them. It’s a tempting argument, but I’m not buying it.

My main problem with the argument is that it’s narrow and short-sighted. From a political angle, we shouldn’t be focusing our energies on giving the moderate Republicans an out from the war, but in fact looking to recruit them to the Democratic party. Period. This entire Bush debacle and the fact that Republicans are so firmly behind him is souring moderate conservatives left and right on the Republican party, and they’re ready to hear about why the party switch is right for them. And it is. Most moderate conservatives are actually “liberals” in our lexicon that’s been shoved so far to the right, and they belong with the Democrats anyway. Letting Ron Paul play the moderate, anti-war conservative continues the myth that such a beast really exists anymore, but pointing out that he’s a crank who runs with people whose main opposition to the war is their sense that Jews are getting away with something hastens the demise of the myth of the moderate conservative. Pointing out that Paul is a kook reinforces the message: If you vote Republican, your choices are crazy people or imperialists out to maximize corporate profits, even if the price is paid in the blood hundreds of thousands (and over a million if we move on Iran) of people.

From what I can tell, Paul’s supporters are a weird mix of white supremacists, kooks who use the misleading label “libertarian”, and naive people who like the idea of legalizing weed and stopping the war. This is what we need to happen with these three groups: The first needs to be completely marginalized, without any influence at all over major party candidates. The second isn’t going anywhere, but they’re really just Republicans with particularly acute masculine anxiety issues and will probably vote for Giuliani anyway. The third need to sack up, grow a brain and vote for the Democrats. We can’t get Paul to drop out, but we can help get these three results by making it utterly clear that Paul is crazy and runs with some really ugly racists.

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Ampersand has a hysterical post up where he points out that Megan McArdle’s entire system of whiny arguments about using taxes for “charity” is based on the incorrect notion that only the wealthy pay taxes. But I what I find interesting about it is the conversation he references illuminates how libertarianism is simply a weak cover story for good, old-fashioned class warfare.

I don’t know why Matt should find this remarkable:

Still, the main psychological point remains that there’s a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics.

After all, we’ve already internalized the notion that advocating taxing other people in order to give their money to someone else is somehow morally akin to charity.

That’s why I’m mostly unable to get on the train with the strange fascination with this woman. Yes, she’s horrendously wrong and pig-headed and possesses a shocking lack of self-awareness, but I’m a softie and I just end up embarrassed for her. I mean, she thought that was a zinger. It’s like watching a hobo in a top hat; some laugh at his delusions, but I just cringe and look away.

Anyway, the whole statement betrays the fundamental issue with libertarianism, which is that it’s not based around a concept of liberty so much as it’s based around the concept that the bodies of the working class are the actual property of the rich. Sending people to die in war while avoiding the service yourself makes perfect sense in this regard; the working class belong to you, and you can dispose of their bodies for your own means if you see fit. Not saying that Megan believes that outright, necessarily, but she clearly from this statement thinks that the use of other human beings lives to advance an imperialist agenda is, on the moral scale, far down the list from asking the worthy rich to pay back to a society that has given them so much while others have so little.

Her obsession with relabeling social spending “charity” makes me bananas; it’s a common trope on the right and it’s meant to reinforce the idea that the wealthy are morally superior to the poor. And because they are morally superior, they shouldn’t encourage moral inferiority with generosity, and if they privately extend charity, then it’s best to do so with strings attached, for the moral improvement of the poor. Get them off the welfare rolls and into the churches where they have to at least pretend to love your definition of Jesus before they get to eat. This view of social spending infects the government under conservatives—the maudlin concern for the souls of the poor has led BushCo to do things like tie welfare benefits to finger-wagging classes about the importance of marriage, for instance. The main thing is that if you’re poor, assistance needs to be tied to a ritual humiliation of some sort, some kind of admission from the recipient that they’re not worthy. Public assistance for the middle class and the wealthy (in the form of schools, roads, corporate tax breaks, the court system, government bailouts, etc.) is not tied to humiliation; because of our relative wealth, you can tell god already likes us better and therefore we don’t need moral improvement. It’s a baffling worldview to me—there’s no reality-based reason to think the poor are morally inferior as a class. For instance, the rich as a class start wars and wreck economies, leaving people in dire straits all the time. The poor do that pretty rarely, so already there’s two giant, overwhelming points in their favor. And even if some poor people do in fact spend welfare checks on alcohol and gambling, that’s still nickels and dimes in the moral account book compared to what Halliburton and Lockheed Martin do with their huge government no-bid contract giveaways, which end up feeding a machine that kills people. All the beer-soaked poker games in the world have no hope of causing the deaths of over 600,000 Iraqis. Single moms drawing welfare checks might not be submissive to a patriarchal definition of morality, but somehow that doesn’t caused millions of refugees fleeing a war-torn nation. I could go on, but you get the point.

Why no, that hacking sound I’m making is merely my allergies getting to me.

I find myself dwelling with fascination over this post of Atrios’s where he links two quotes about Alan Greenspan that are currently heavy in buzz rotation with a quote from Ayn Rand about how white people were justified in snatching lands from Native Americans. I’m fascinated both by Atrios’s cleverness in doing this (his point being that Greenspan’s support of the war and BushCo’s motivations from the beginning were pure imperialism wearing a missionary-for-democracy guise), and more by the sheer “duh” factor with the quotes.

The first “duh” revelation is what I thought everyone knew, which is that Greenspan was a dipshit Objectivist in his youth. I’m quoting a different part from what Atrios did, FYI, so read his post.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

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One of my all-time favorite conservative weak rhetorical tricks is to build up strawliberals who do very stupid things and then throw a fit when said strawliberals won’t do those very stupid things. More often than not, it’s tangentially related to a value that does exist that said wingnut finds repulsive. For example, in the comment moderation queue at Pandagon, I’ll often find a series of comments that call the bloggers and commenters racist/homophobic/sexist things or threaten them or things like that. After 3 or 4 of these comments, you’ll read, “Gosh, you liberals don’t seem to like free speech as much as you think.” Which means the commenter is almost surely a fascist who hates the First Amendment and has convinced himself that the law requires you to put up with the virtual equivalent of someone starting fights in bars, possibly to justify morally his desire to ban any non-White-House-press-release-based reporting. That free speech is completely protected in that he can start his own blog to call everyone here every name under the sun is irrelevant—surely liberals must be bigger hypocrites than Republicans who pass anti-gay legislation while sucking some cock at night. Surely.

But setting up a strawliberal value and then getting angry when liberals won’t honor it (while excusing yourself from honoring it, of course) is not just the hobby of drooling wingnuts that leave nasty comments at liberal blogs. From Kathy G. comes this awesome entry to the genre from James Kirchick, who has convinced himself that “tolerance” means that liberals are obliged to set up free brothels for wingnuts to make up for the perceived sex gap between people whose politics make them too repulsive to fuck and people who get laid through the old-fashioned process of making themselves appealing enough to attract volunteers.

‘I can’t date someone with a different belief system” is what he told me. I expected this answer from the guy I had been casually seeing. From early on, I suspected that our differing political bents – his liberal, mine more conservative – would ultimately cause a split. Once, we had a heated argument when I said offhandedly that people who could not afford to care for children should not have them (not a policy prescription, just a profession of personal ethics). After that, I tried to avoid political discussions altogether. So his answer did not come as much of a surprise when, a few weeks after we broke up, I asked him for his reasons. His beliefs euphemism didn’t render the blow any softer: We’re both Jewish.

So much for dating a proud, progressive, and ostensibly tolerant liberal. But with him, as with other liberals I know, tolerance does not always extend to appreciating someone else’s differing political views. Now living in Cambridge and having grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to school at Yale, I’ve been surrounded by liberals for nearly all of my life. Most would be astonished to hear that they’re the most intolerant people I’ve ever met. After all, I, the supposedly closed-minded conservative, never considered this guy’s liberal politics anathema to the point of wanting to call off our relationship.

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Libertarianism is so silly it can be shot down in a one page FAQ.

Via.

How Homeland Security Works

Last night I went for a walk and was listening to the BBC morning news on NPR. The main topic, as one might expect, was the Virginia Tech tragedy; one of the main angles they were pushing, of course, was the US gun culture. I always enjoy listening to British people try to wrap their heads around this topic, and today was no exception. They really don’t understand why an event like this wouldn’t lead to a Virginia-wide or nationwide call for tightened restrictions - or outright ban - on firearms.

And, as one might expect, advocates from both sides of the debate were happy to step forward and provide information. A representative from Virginians for Public Safety talked about the problem of third-party and gun show sales in Virginia, which are unregulated. Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, informed the presenter that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will own guns. (And, like Michelle Malkin, he said that if college students were allowed to carry guns, this tragedy could have been lessened. I imagine that today’s predictable revelation that this tragedy was actually perpetrated by a college student carrying a gun had no effect on him.)
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Federalist No.86: No bogarting.

Digby wrote the post I was going to write, and what’s worse, wrote it before I even thought of writing it. Typical.

Via Avedon Carol, I was reminded of this speech by James Madison on the subject of impeachment…

Yes, impeachment was considered the remedy for such high crimes and misdemeanors as the promotion and protection of incompetent government officers and the “wanton removal” of good ones. The founders didn’t anticipate that serving and pleasuring the president would be casually accepted as politics as usual.

Instead, we now have a political party and pitiful press corps who think that all this manipulation of the justice system for partisan gain is just adorable, while this was worthy of impeachment…

The irony, of course, is that James Madison is the premier patron saint of the conservative movement. Which is what makes this so funny:

Well, here are a few facts that the MSM and the Democrats seem to not be aware of. First, federal prosecutors are appointed by the President and serve at the pleasure of the President, which means he can fire them for any reason…

Secondly, in 1993 then President Clinton and his Attorney General Janet Reno in a one day fired all ninety-three US Attorneys. At the time there was no investigation, no cries for Janet Reno to be fired, in fact, the media called it a clean-sweep and a fresh start…

By now you are probably wondering why this is such a big story? You might be tempted to think that the firings were motivated by partisan politics, getting rid of a few holdover Democrats in the Justice Department. That could be true except seven of the prosecutors identify themselves as Republican with the other listed as an independent. However, even if the firings were politically motivated, it would not matter because US attorneys are political appointees.

That’s right, the Wayne State Chapter of the Federalist Society - an organization that has as its logo a bust of James Madison - is defending the right of a President to wantonly remove meritorious officers.

From Scott Lemieux, I found this awesome review of a new book of collected writings for Playboy, and by “awesome” I mean, “properly contemptous and snarky towards Hugh Hefner.” The official feminist stance on Playboy is it is cheesy objectification, and while that’s true, I can’t help but note that Hef’s major crime against my nerves is being so full of shit. Luckily, the reviewer John Leland not only nails Hef to the ground for this, but he realizes nothing drives home the point than Hef’s own words. And he opens the reivew by quoting him.

In the first issue of Playboy magazine, published in December 1953, Hugh M. Hefner wrote an essay speaking for its envisioned readers: “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.�? On first blush his commercial strategy here seemed straightforward: Men who make a habit of inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz and sex will have a lot of free nights for reading Playboy magazine. Empires have been built on lesser principles.

Ask the average Playboy reader/Hef-worshipper the difference between a Nietzsche and Picasso and enjoy watching them fumble. And if you’re about to earnestly explain to me that you can’t compare a philosopher to an artist, you’re probably also the sort of bore who thinks there’s value in this image that Hef has painted of the vaguely educated man “discussing” Nietzsche with a woman dressed in a bunny suit and/or is a model/fixture around the Playboy Mansion—in other words, whose very job is to be dumb and non-threatening and fuckable, but certainly not to actually discuss art or philosophy, even if she knows what these things are all about. Hefner himself has strained not to live up to this fantasy of the old-fashioned concubine, who could trade witty barbs with men before bedding down with them. If there’s any greater disrespect for the idea of intelligence in women than the list of turn ons and turn offs that accompany centerfolds in Playboy magazine, I don’t know what it is.

The question in my mind is why does he even bother to set up this image of pseudo-sophistication while also pandering to men who fear the idea of a spark of intelligence in a woman more than death itself? Well, my theory is that Playboy’s pseudo-sophistication is the art of selling denial to men. On a certain level, sexist men are often aware that it’s pathetic to want women to be dumb and compliant. And that is an embarrassing thing to realize about yourself, that you’re so incapable of holding your own that you squawk at the idea of socializing with women that aren’t giving your ego a handicap with a Hooters uniform or a bunny costume or playing dumb or whatever. So in comes Playboy with Hugh Hefner, who needs a who string of women playing bimbo to calm his ego, but claims to be The Man and that by reading his magazine, you too can convince yourself that you’re actually not a feeb, but a sophisticated man of the world.

As the review notes, this particular sales pitch lost its allure.

The fix was in from the start. It held sway over American men until the arrival of a medium even more effective at replacing male curiosity with useless pudding: 24-hour sports television.

Which is to say the American Male Sleazebag gave up even pretending to be intellectually curious and just dove right into not giving a shit at all. Anti-intellectualism is as American as apple pie; Hef’s little routine is very 50s-60s and a quaint relic. Not that sports fans are all anti-intellectual, of course. In fact, I wouldn’t even point to 24-hour sports TV as evidence that the Pig Brigade has given up even trying to seem sophisticated or sharp. Maxim magazine and the ubiquitious Hooters chain is far better evidence of that. “I go there for the chicken wings!” vs. “I read it for the articles!” tells you everything you need to know about that.

Still, it’s well-understood that Playboy’s need to project pseudo-sophistication meant they were willing to pay top dollar to some of the best writers. Call it the Law of Unintended Consequences or just the silver lining in the cloud. I can’t help but be mildly supportive of any endeavor that enriches the pen-pushers out there, so it’s a shame that there’s not more of an audience out there anymore for a little fake sophistication to decorate the pictures of 18-year-olds posing naked with deliberately dumb looks on their faces. Outside of that, though, I actually prefer the dumb sexist crap a lot more than the pseudo-sophistication thing. It has a certain intellectual honesty to it that I appreciate, an acknowledgement that being a sexist pig is stupid but that the pig in question doesn’t give a shit.

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If you think libertarian views on the markets are simplistic and maddening, what’s really astonishing and fun is watching said libertarians apply those views to sex and dating. A couple of readers have sent me some libertarian blogging on sexuality and the heightened levels of self-delusion that feed this political, ahem, philosophy would be sad if not so funny.

First off is this blog by this libertarian blogger who is obsessed with Playboy, because the female half of the ubermensch equation is airbrush and two dimensional. And that’s possibly too deep an interpretation, because even though the guy who writes it insists that he’s extraordinarily intelligent and intellectual in every post, he’s not smart enough to really grasp that there is nothing that screams “Loser” like a man who is obsessed with Playboy. I’ve tried not to read his blog since it’s been brought to my attention, but seriously, there’s just a train wreck quality to it. Like his latest post, where he congratulates himself for being a workaholic.

When I sense that sheer willpower can’t save me from a bad habit, I try to imagine what James Hillman would have to say about it. I think my workaholism might remind him of Hephaestus, the crippled craftsman of the Olympian gods, counterpart to the Roman Vulcan. “Like cures like,�? Hillman often says, meaning that the deity lurking in the “symptoms�? carries the psychic cure for those symptoms in his or her own imagery. Hillman would be pleased to know that I’ve just started practicing the didgeridoo. This instrument requires the use of the cheeks as a pair of bellows to keep air running through the pipe during inhalation; bellows suggest the god of the blacksmith’s forge. If I understand Hillman’s reasoning correctly, this association holds sufficient meaning despite the fact that I wasn’t thinking about Hephaestus at all when I bought the didj. I did it to treat my sleep apnea. The sort of man who reads Playboy doesn’t want to snore, now, does he? By the way, Aphrodite was often said to be the wife of Hephaestus.

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The governor’s race in Alabama sure is getting interesting. The Libertarian Party has selected Loretta Nall as its candidate and she’s getting a lot of attention, and surprise, it’s not all about the issues. Gee…

Her slogan is Vote Nall Y’all…It’s Just Common Sense.This is a race with the disgraced, de-benched judge Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore in it, and former governor Don Siegelman, who is being tried on racketeering charges). Kathy at Birmingham Blues notes:

Her platform includes support for initiative & referendum, drug policy and prison reform, tax cuts for private and home school families, repealing sales tax on food, non-compliance with the Patriot and REAL ID Acts, calling for Alabama National Guard troops to be brought home from Iraq, separation of religion and government, legal lottery and casino gambling run by private enterprise, and the promotion and development of alternative fuel sources so that Alabama can begin to decrease its dependence on foreign oil.

I’m happy that the people of Alabama can choose between three candidates who didn’t end up fired or indicted based on their performance in previous government positions. It’s also good to have an outspoken woman in the race.

Nall is a woman who isn’t afraid (in the bible belt) to put the link “Boobs & Panties….Who Knew??” right up on her campaign web site. That’s refreshing.

If you’re wondering about the whole booby thing, the well-endowed gubernatorial candidate had to put up with two guys named Bob who are fixated on Ms. Nall’s breasticles — and not even nude ones — it doesn’t take much in God’s country. (more…)

Okay, I can understand self-identified conservatives getting on board with the idea that the President should be able to flout the Constitution whenever he wants as long as he makes grim faces and talks about national security in patronizing tones. In the year 2006, I think it’s safe to say that the word “conservative” actually means “authoritarian”, and with some conservatives like Ann Coulter, it’s just another word for “wannabe fascist”. But, as I’ve mentioned before, I cannot get on board with people who claim to be libertarians who are all about the President deciding he doesn’t have to respect civil liberties with this spying scandal. Today, Glenn Reynolds is whining about how the NY Times is supposedly putting our national security in danger by alerting Americans to the fact that our President mixed up “uphold the Constitution” with “wipe your ass with the Constitution”. It never ceases to amaze me how delusional wankers like this fucktard can both imagine that they’re big, tough, gun-toting “libertarians” who totally could kick some terrorist/illegal immigrant/union worker ass, but when the President claims he’s acting in the interest of national security they run and hide under the bed and scream, “Whatever you want, Mr. President! Just don’t let the big, scary terrorists hurt me!”

Because cowards like Glenn and Spooge Worshipper J*ff G*ldstein will abandon their claim to their civil liberties at the mere thought of terrorism, I’m thinking the word “libertarian” shouldn’t apply to them anymore, seeing as how it implies that they give two shits about liberty. They need a new word to describe themselves, something more accurate to describe a political philosophy that seems mostly to be about obtaining the benefits of being a conservative (compensating for perceived inadequecies by feeling like a big, tough man) without the drawbacks (going to church, pretending you’re opposed to porn and drug use). However, I can’t think of any new words that aren’t way too long like “phallicworshippingdelusionalwhinatarians” so I open up the thread to readers–what should be the new, more accurate term for “libertarians” who don’t care about liberty?

It’s a sad fucking day when V*x “Women Shouldn’t Have the Right to Vote” D*y realizes before the saner so-called libertarians out there that nothing is more inconsistent with the idea of “libertarianism” than rolling over and making excuses for the President while he violates basic civil rights.

And this isn’t one of those “even a broken clock has the right time every 12 hours” things, my libertarians-who-love-Bush-not-really-friends. The crazy right-wing anti-Semitic writer of loopy bad sci-fi novels wised up before you. Someone who’s one trust fund away from raving on a street corner boarded the clue train before y’all. Isn’t that even remotely embarrassing?

At this point, I’m inclined to think some folks on the right love Bush so much they’d lick his ass even if he came for their guns.

A much more thorough spanking of “libertarians” like Jeff Goldstein to be found here.

Roxanne’s feeling the shame with a musical bent.

Link sent by a reader and his comment on it, submitted by me without any more comment.

Fuck Glenn Reynolds and his McCarthy-lite accidentally-tenured ass. He wants to use death and destruction around the world as notches on his belt of Democrat-hatred. If his only way of dealing with the real issues around us is to run back to his security blanket of being a “reasonable” douchebag rather than an admittedly overt one, then I have a suggestion for him: Go run to a not-at-all dangerous city in Iraq, get some not-a-chemical-weapon white phosphorous poured on him while he’s out shopping for a new wi-fi router, and while he’s laying on the ground, skin sizzling and mind racing past the latest consumer reports rankings of surround-sound systems, I sure as fuck hopes he finds a Democrat to blame for it.

John “Mustachio Fats” Stossel tries to make a point about healthcare and our insane expectations that it actually help with routine medical costs.

This, of course, explains why countries with universal health insurance spend less on health care and services per capita than we do…

Let’s look at this healthcare dynamic, which I’ve seen recycled by many an HSA proponent. The purpose of insurance, they say, should be to cover catastrophic health needs, with the rest taken care of by savings.
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I’m a libertarian. Let’s stop talking about casualties in Iraq - it’s all the same anyway.

I’m a libertarian. You know Darfur? There’s a lot of people still alive, and all the refugees would probably feel better if we focused on them.

I’m a libertarian. Fuck off.

UPDATE: As a note to certain commenters, the point is not merely “hating libertarians”, although it’s easy to gloss over that point. It’s that Tierney was hired as a contradictory voice on the editorial page, largely because he was a libertarian, and has pretty much been writing pieces that sound exactly like most psuedo-tarians: he doesn’t like things he associates with liberals, and instead of making the conservative suggestion, he makes a slightly different, wackier, and sparklier one.

Or maybe I do just hate libertarians. Who knows?