Libertarian Think Tank

Chris Peden is a longshot candiate who is running for the Republican nomination against Congressman Ron Paul in the 14th Conrgessional District of Texas. His slogan promises “Conservative Results…for a change”. You see, in Pedenland the Iraq War with its attending budget deficits, loss of American lives, and rampant, destructive corporatism…is conservative. And of course, his website calls Ron Paul a “liberal in disguise“. You know…because strict constitutionalists are liberals now.

Peden hails from the new school of conservatism, which doesn’t bother to define itself so long as it cites Jesus. It’s hard to say what the logical extremes of a term without definition are, so let’s just assume it’s somewhere within the nexus of kissing Bush’s ass, killing more soldiers, and forcing people into churches at gunpoint (evangelical churches, of course). Barry Goldwater is rolling in his grave. Oh, I guess Buckley is now, too.

Never missing an opportunity to spazz, the website Wonkette.com has endorsed Chris Peden for no other reason than to irk Paul supporters. No, Wonkette doesn’t have a problem with Paul’s politics. The worst they have accused him of is failing to represent his district. His district apparently disagrees, as they have sent him back to Congress ten times. Yet, Wonkette’s Sara K. Smith cannot help herself:

 To most American political fanatics, Ron Paul is just a goofy hobbit whose hilariously doomed online presidential campaign provided standout entertainment in a year that offered a wealth of hilariously doomed campaigns.

But to many of his constituents in Texas Congressional District 14, Ron Paul is just a blame-America-first attention whore who completely ignores the people who put him in office. There are no Democrats running in the 14th District primary next Tuesday — so if Ron Paul loses, he will have the honor of being a double loser in the eyes of his beloved constituents. With this in mind, Wonkette enthusiastically endorses Chris Peden for Congress.

<Yawn> How Clever. Of course, Wonkette doesn’t care about Peden’s politics either. They don’t seem to care about politics at all. They’re the kids in high school with Doc Martins and dark lipstick (yes, the males too) who compensated for their lack of substance with cynicism. No, not your high school: the rich kids’ high school. And while they have found quite a following among the rest of the jaded-by-self-imposition, they didn’t impose this on themselves before they tried out for the cheer sqaud.

Yet Megan McArdle finds them interesting enough to post the above blurb and I find McArdle interesting enough to add her comment:

 To be sure, I’d probably be happier if more congressmen busied themselves proposing no-hope bills to make a point. But when your congressman is the only one doing it, while all the other representatives focus on piling up the pork, you probably begin to wonder if you aren’t missing the main chance.

Well, with Paul absolutely routing Peden in the primaries, I don’t know if they’re wondering it that much. But I concede that is the sad motivation behind the Galveston Daily News’ endorsement of Peden:

In the next two years, leaders in Galveston County will join those from other counties in District 14 in asking for a lot of federal funding. They’ll ask for help on projects such as research at the Galveston National Laboratory and on NASA’s mission to Mars…Peden is the better choice.

In other words, why vote for someone whose politics make sense when you can be a whore for federal funding? Just kidding. Whores have better taste.

Good advice to readers, GDN. That oughta fix the country.

I’m inclined to write something long and thoughtful about Buckley, but for now, my email to the person who informed me of his death will have to suffice:

What a shame.  I watched his interview with Charlie Rose where he said he was ready to die. I think that’s fitting. Buckley wouldn’t die without deciding the terms and the time. I wish my generation had a Buckley. It almost seems fitting that the “Father of the Modern Conservative Movement would die as McCain rises to power and Bush ransacks the principles of conservatism. In fact, I think he died 7 years too late.

Buckley with Charlie Rose:

In hindsight, that email was selfish. Buckley was much more than what he was famous for. He should have died when he bloody well did, not synchronized with my notion of his place in history.

On the other hand, one cannot help but compare Buckley to the confused-o-cons who have tarnished the message, if not the image of conservatism. Here’s a pretty famous one who goes by the name of Mike Huckabee:

 ”So all conservatives owe Bill Buckley a great debt. Today, while our thoughts and prayers are with the Buckley family, we conservatives continue to draw inspiration from his life and work. But there is more to be done. It is up to us to carry on, fulfilling his enormous legacy.”

Huckabee taking up Buckley’s legacy? Buckley opposed the Iraq War and the War on Drugs. The ‘conservatism’ that Buckley fathered was hardly distinguishable from ‘classical liberalism’ which is, itself indistinguishable from ‘libertarianism’. Buckley was a huge Goldwater supporter and Huckabee’s opponent is Goldwater-Conservatism’s veritable legacy: Ron Paul. In fact, Goldwater Jr. endorsed Ron Paul against Mike Huckabee.

Meanwhile, Huckabee said he would be amenable to a nationwide smoking ban. If you are a conservative and you don’t know why that is contradictory, you are not a conservative.

Buckley debating Noam Chomsky:

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later:

Thanks to Diebold’s trickery, Ralph Nader won’t win in 2008, either. Of course, this will be more humorous if you know the Diebold controversy.

Anyone who knows my politics knows the esteem I have for Boaz, the Cato Institute, and most other classically liberal names or institutions you can chuck up. So, it is with an especially heavy heart that I weave this critical narrative. The title alludes that David Boaz did nothing for the last installment of the liberty movement ala “Ron Paul Revolution”, but that isn’t exactly true. Instead, I think Boaz smacked liberty back a notch with this strange post on the CATO Institutes’s blog. But first, a primer:

Congressman Ronald Paul came to the 2008 Presidential elections with no money, no campaign infrastructure, and no name recognition. He arrived with only an idea, but his idea compelled hundreds of thousands of Americans to donate over $32 million and create the largest grassroots movement in history. College students gave up their entire Christmas breaks to sleep in cold New Hampshire cabins and canvas for 16-hour days. Quick-witted Texas judges held signs at conventions and out-smarted the likes of Hugh Hewitt. People like me spent hours trying to explain the more esoteric aspects of a Paul presidency for the masses.

Paul’s largest support base was not students, potheads, or southern militia members, though. It was the Unites States military. In fact, Paul received more donations from the Army alone than from any other single group. The military, as a whole, donated more to the Paul campaign than to all the other presidential campaigns combined, for two fiscal quarters in a row. Since military members are not afforded the right to free speech while in uniform, we can pretty much count on their checkbooks to do the talking. The experts on Iraqi progress had spoken. Along with so many other Paul supporters, many of them had spoken for the first time.

The more intellectual media took notice. Andrew Sullivan outright endorsed Paul. Glen Greenwald came close, but I suspect his more hysterical readers scared him off (see the final updates). Judge Andrew Napolitano did everything that his Fox News employer would let him get away with. Buchanan shilled for him all over the pundit circuit. John McLaughlin became a Paul supporter’s hero. Then, came the rest of the media: Tuck Carlson, Lou Dobbs, George Will, even Chris Mathews and Bill Maher gave Paul his propers. Then came some respectable endorsements: the highest ranking governmental libertarian, Governor Gary Johnson took up the charge and Barry Goldwater Jr. hit the campaign trail with Paul.

Professional scathers refused to scathe him. John Stewart was cordial and Colbert rose to his defense in satire, “that kind of crazy…sticks a little”.

Despite what could seem like momentum in retrospect, however, these positive mentions were notably isolated. In reality, there was a serious dearth of Ron Paul coverage. In fact, most coverage was rather negative with Fox News leading the charge. Almost every article posted on the web proceeded with “Paul can’t win, but…”. Some simply called him nuts off the bat. Fox was undeniably evil to Paul. They excluded him from some debates and mocked him in the rest. (Below is the clip that was just so putrid, even Fox couldn’t stomach rebroadcasting it). In the CNN/Youtube debate, CNN’s Anderson Cooper didn’t even bother to pick substantive questions for Paul (What are you going to do when you lose? Why are your supporters into conspiracies?) . Finally, MSNBC’s David Shuster (who was recently suspended for being an idiot) took cracks at Paul for saying the same stuff Judge Napolitano says all the time.

It wasn’t just ugly and gut-wrenching, it was stupid- stupider than I thought the press could ever get. While it was obvious that Paul’s political opponents (Giuliani) could earn some clout by attacking him for saying the same things an unguarded Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the 9/11 commission report already said, it was a complete surprise that the media would pick up on this attack-the-last-sane-guy-for-being-crazy attitude. They focused on his suggestion to maybe-possibly-sort-of remove the capital gains taxes on gold and other esoterica that Paul already promised would never work. But let us be clear about something: there was never a debate on the merits. No one could ever claim Paul was wrong. They just claimed he was crazy.

Supporters reacted in different ways. Some hounded journalists. Some took to canvassing. I wrote articles. Our candidate’s acceptability hung in the balance like Reagan in 1976. If only there were a major libertarian organization to concretize Paul’s candidacy…

The Cato Institute was supposed to set everything and everyone straight. They could out-argue everyone on economics. They could fill in the nuances between Paul’s 30-second soundbites. They could bring the old guard of limited government Republicans back into the fold. They would legitimize a helluva lot. David Boaz to Ron Paul could be like Bill Kristol to George W. Bush, except accurate in his predictions and not so deserving of a proper beating by the entire United States Military. And it was sure to come…I mean…if Bill Maher could say something nice about Paul, God knows the biggest libertarian think tank would bring it home. But nothing was happening. They just acted like he didn’t exist.

I had already read about the Ron Paul newsletters and had gotten over them, so I didn’t expect the hysteria surrounding them. When I read them, I had a moment of panic. “Jesus”, I thought “what if I’ve been supporting a closet white supremacist all this time?” Then I looked at his record on torture, habeas corpus, battlefield commissions, extraordinary renditions…extraordinary renditions for God’s sake! It would take a strange sort of xenophobe to grant habeas corpus to enemy combatants, but what kind of klansman cares about giving Afghanis due process? I was back on track with Paul. I was even proud of him again.

But then we had the fortune/misfortune of beating the snot out of Giuliani in Iowa, where (for the record) Giuliani made more visits than Ron Paul. Determined not to let that happen again in New Hampshire, someone made the call to skunk the election with these newsletters, again…except this time, with hype!

The fallout was to be marveled at. Andrew Sullivan still has not recovered. His endorsee for president rarely gets mentioned on his blog. The Reason Magazine guys tried to compensate by investigating every detail and then avoiding Ron Paul altogether. David Frum was as giddy as a schoolgirl. I suspect he won’t reach the same dopamine levels until McCain declares war on the entire Middle East. And then finally…David Boaz of the Cato Institute broke his peace, but just to slap us in the face:

And so it’s understandable that over the past few months a lot of people have been asking why writers at the Cato Institute seemed to display a lack of interest in or enthusiasm for the Paul campaign. Well, now you know. We had never seen the newsletters that have recently come to light, and I for one was surprised at just how vile they turned out to be. But we knew the company Ron Paul had been keeping, and we feared that they would have tied him to some reprehensible ideas far from the principles we hold.

Really? I mean…really? Boaz left the entire liberty movement twisting in the wind, not because of the newsletters, but because he knew Paul had friends who were capable of less-vile newsletters?

In hindsight, I wasn’t nearly as bothered by Boaz’s heretofore neglect of the rEVOLution, as I was offended that had the audacity to hurt it. It’s one thing to remain silent, but it’s another to construct a defensive posture by attacking Paul. He exaggerated Paul’s connection to the newsletters, and even criticized Paul directly: “That’s an odd claim on which to run for president: I didn’t know what my closest associates were doing over my signature, so give me responsibility for the federal government.” Apparently for Boaz, Paul’s platform consists solely of denying his connection to the newsletters. I suppose then, that Al Gore ran on a platform of having smoked weed as a teenager.

Really, the absurdity of this reasoning is incredible. Obama’s days of snorting smack are over. George Bush’s too. McCain thinks that we should have stuck out VietNam beyond the point where the public demanded withdrawal. But Ron Paul should be punished for something some provocateur wrote during the inception of the politically correct era. The guy who refuses the congressional pension program because he won’t enrich himself on taxpayer money, the guy who treated his patients for free because he refused Medicare, the guy who refused to spend the Social Security Trust…he’s not good enough because he didn’t guard his publication closely enough, 20 years ago. Way to demonstrate the courage of your convictions.

But I suspect the stink was motivated by something even stupider. Boaz admits what anyone who pays attention already knows, that Dr. Sweetheart just isn’t capable of writing that garbage. He didn’t edit it or even live in proximity to the newsletters’ place of publication. That is why this is especially unfair to the liberty movement- it alludes to something wholly unrelated to Ron Paul: a beef between Boaz and Lew Rockwell. Like two feudal lords who are more content to allow their people to be conquered than to reconcile old qualms, Boaz obstinately refuses to show up on the battlefield because he doesn’t want to help Rockwell win.

I should be charitable to Cato and Boaz, though. Even though, amazingly, Boaz mentions the newsletters as his foremost reason for keeping quiet and then attacking Paul, I suspect the auxiliary factor was a prevailing attitude at Cato that Paul doesn’t have a chance. So why bother? Cato’s Michael Tanner wrote an article that handicaps Paul several times. Perhaps if they saw Paul as more viable, they would have gotten onboard and looked past the hysteria. It’s just…well one would expect the libertarian support structure to make the effort before the GOP voters.

More importantly, we were never fighting this thing for the odds. We fought it for the stakes. With the specter of universal health care looming, there is no doubt that the U.S. is headed toward a socialist, populist trend that may very well be irreversible. Just try taking heath care away from little old ladies once it’s in place- no matter how ineffective it is. Worse, what does Boaz propose for the the Americans who will die in Iraq over the next four years? “Sorry kid, but your candidate just wasn’t wartless enough”? And how can Cato allow an entire generation of newly minted libertarians to slip back into an apathy-induced coma, when we could be building an infrastructure for the next libertarian candidate? I recently had a conversation with one of them. It went like this:

College Kid: “Ron Paul is the man! I totally agree with him about reducing the size of government, elimninating the income tax, and practicing social tolerance” (paraphrased)

Me: “Well, stay tuned because we need to be ready for the next libertarian candidate”

Kid: “yeah. I don’t know much about that party”.

Get it? He didn’t know libertarian from Libertarian. He agrees with the policy proposals, but he couldn’t explain the core tenets from which they issue. I am sure Obama will find him a replacement ideology, though. I know, because he told me Obama was his second choice.

The tragedy of all this is that so many libertarians who are content to mentally masturbate in perpetua ignore the very real social aspect in play. People will be robbed of their possessions by the federal government over the next four years. Innovation will be stymied. And not just a few military families will be wearing all black. Sure, Ron Paul might have lost anyway. But I would rather he lost without having a huge “what if?” hanging over our heads.

A few final points about how Boaz is dead wrong:

First, I disagree about whether it’s worthy to criticize Kirchick:

Mutterings about the past mistakes of the New Republic or the ideological agenda of author James Kirchick are beside the point. Maybe Bob Woodward didn’t like Quakers; the corruption he uncovered in the Nixon administration was still a fact, and that’s all that mattered. Ron Paul’s most visible defenders have denounced Kirchick as a “pimply-faced youth”.

Nonsense. Paul’s newsletters should be judged on their own merits, yes, but Cato and everyone else let Kirchick frame this issue for them. The day before he published his article, Kirchick was on national television claiming that Ron Paul speaks to white supremacists in a secret code that only they can decipher. He titled the article “Angry White Man” knowing damned well that Paul probably didn’t write them, but also knowing that he would plant the seed that Paul did. Meanwhile, the newsletters themselves…sorry, they weren’t all horrible. One or two were especially bad. The rest were just provocative. I listened to Johnny Carson say worse back then. The fact is that that this could have been spun either way. If Boaz bought into the gravity of this thing, he simply bought the Kirchick version. And he allowed Kirchick to gloss over the comparative immorality of Paul’s opponents.

Second, I think it’s foolish to fracture libertarians like this. Boaz somehow thinks Paul, an adherent of Rand, Friedman, Jefferson, Locke…etc isn’t a real libertarian. He puts “libertarian” in quotes when he’s describing Paul and he even refers to Paul as a conservative. It’s getting a little tiring watching libertarians line in a circular firing squad. Especially since their differences are so boringly nuanced. Maybe we should wait until we actually obtain a public office before we stab each other over intellectual property, or abortion…or whatever Boaz’s line of distinction is.

Finally, if Cato couldn’t overcome their beef with Paul or Rockwell, or us crazed supporters, they should have kept quiet. Now that the newsletter-thing has blown over, it is clear that there was never a risk of damage to the liberty movement at all. If anything, Boaz did more damage to it. He could have been content to acquiesce in the destruction of liberties, but he went even farther.

You see, I was never one of the Paul supporters who needed to believe Paul *would* win in order to keep going. I knew that we needed Cato or Greenspan or someone to say, “yeah, the Fed is a problem”, “yeah, gold makes good tender”. Greenspan ignored us. I know, because I wrote him a letter asking him not to. But Cato left us wishing they has ignored us. I know this took the wind out a lot of sails because I was on the front lines. So when I say to Cato, “thanks for nothing”, I’m being charitable.

In conclusion, I will still respect Cato and Boaz and I’m sure I will go to them for advice if I am ever in public office. I know that, like Ron Paul, Boaz adheres to the tenet of self-governance that inspired the Declaration of Independence. It’s just that, out of Paul and Boaz, I will stick with the guy who would have enough gumption to actually sign it.

DIGG THIS

This week’s Air Force Times reports that the USA’s Air Force wants an extra $59 million from the taxpayer next year to pay for a campaign to win tens of billions in yet more funding from the taxpayer.

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