H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.
November 29, 2011
May 13, 2011
To no great surprise, Ron Paul announces his presidential bid
He may not expect to win (he doesn’t have the support of the GOP backroom), but he will almost certainly make the race more interesting:
U.S. Representative Ron Paul, who has been called the intellectual godfather of the Tea Party, said Friday that the “time is right” for him to try once more to seize the Republican nomination for president.
The Texas Republican and anti-war libertarian announced his third White House bid on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program, saying he is already seeing unprecedented grass-roots support for his long-held calls to reduce the federal debt, government spending and the size of government.
“Coming in No. 1 in the Republican primary is an absolute possibility many, many times better than it was four years ago,” said Mr. Paul, an obstetrician who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican in 2008 and as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988.
January 31, 2011
QotD: A hopeful view of Egypt’s way forward
The Old Media — not to mention Hillary Clinton’s comic relief State Department — apparently don’t have a clue what’s really going on. Conservative talk radio already assumes that the whole thing has been orchestrated by militant “Islamists”, in particular, the 80-year-old Muslim Brotherhood. Whenever you see that word, mentally remove the first R to get a clearer picture if what they’re really up to.
The Botherhood of Man is gonna gitcha if you don’t look out.
But I digress.
America’s home grown would-be dictators clearly believe “It can’t happen here”, as demonstrated by their reactions — dazed at first, then hysterical — to the far gentler rise of the Tea Parties and the results of the 2010 election, which they are trying to believe never happened. They’ve spent all of their time since, not changing so that they won’t be despised any more, but trying to shut their critics up by destroying talk radio and requiring individuals to have Internet permits.
[. . .]
Out of sheer habit, if nothing else, it is very difficult not make the same mistake as the pundits and politicians. As Robert A. Heinlein observed, every revolution is a freak. By definition there can be no rules to govern or even understand them, and we must avoid thinking collectively about them. There are as many reasons to rebel as there are rebels, and that’s the only important truth we’ll ever glean from them.
It’s also very difficult to say from what we know now, and I could easily be wrong (I have been before), but it seems to me that this is not a fundamentalist uprising like we saw in Iran a generation ago — although the fundamentalists are desperately trying to coopt it — but an essentially secular revolt by the productive class against both fundamentalism and the fascist management states that dominate the region.
L. Neil Smith, “Egyptian Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-01-30
November 3, 2010
Liberty: consistency matters
James Delingpole, after suddenly discovering a man-crush on Marco Rubio, outlines how the Tea Party can still succeed:
[. . .] I’d suggest that the key lesson of yesterday’s mid-terms is this: it is simply not enough to stick a Tea Party label on any old candidate and hope that the US electorate’s growing antipathy towards Big Government will take care of the rest. Christine O’Donnell was more than proof enough of that. Not only did her candidacy allow the liberal MSM to tar the entire Tea Party movement as the natural home of anti-masturbation ex-witches and other fruit loops. But it demonstrated a worrying complacency and ignorance within the Tea Party movement about what it stands for and what it ought to stand for.
Christine O’Donnell puzzled me . . . if she’d actually been a witch, then her anti-masturbation activities made no sense. I’ve met lots of witches, and it’s hard to imagine any of them being anti-sexual in that kind of dogmatic manner. I didn’t follow the story, but I assume that she lost on the basis of both accusations influencing different voting groups.
So, if O’Donnell and other marginal candidates can’t depend on just wearing the “Tea Party” label to get elected, what do they need to do?
The Tea Party does not stand for: banning lesbian or sexually active single women from teaching at schools; discouraging onanism; banning abortion; keeping drugs illegal; God; organised religion generally; guns; or, indeed, Sarah Palin.
The Tea Party stands, very simply, for small government. So long as it understands this, a presidential victory in 2012 is guaranteed. If it forgets this — or doesn’t understand it in the first place — then hello, a second term for President Obama, and bye bye Western Civilisation.
In other words, Delingpole is calling for the Tea Party to be true to a minarchist vision: the least possible government to get the job done.
If you are against Big Government, you are for liberty. If you are for liberty you are also for free citizens’ right to choose whether or not they get out of their trees on cannabis, or indeed whether or not they have the freedom to terminate unwanted pregnancies or never, ever, go to church and in fact worship Satan instead.
Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism — and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones — is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily disapprove of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.
November 2, 2010
James Delingpole: “Thank God for the Tea Party!”
James Delingpole clearly wishes he could vote in today’s American elections:
Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt — as you do on returning to Britain these days — as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.
God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of “don’t tread on me” and “live free or die.” Not all of them, obviously — otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years — and not just in the US but throughout the Western world — government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.
What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this. Sure, we may feel in our hearts that — as Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe put it in their Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party manifesto — “We just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others”. And we may even confide it to our friends after a few drinks. But look at Australia; look at Canada; look at New Zealand; look at anywhere in the EUSSR; look at America — at least until things begin to be improved by today’s glorious revolution. Wherever you go, even if it’s somewhere run by a notionally “conservative” administration, the malaise you will encounter is much the same: a system of governance predicated on the notion that the state’s function is not merely to uphold property rights, maintain equality before the law and defend borders, but perpetually to meddle with its citizens’ lives in order supposedly to make their existence more fair, more safe, more eco-friendly, more healthy. And always the result is the same: more taxation, more regulation, less freedom. Less “fairness” too, of course.
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November 1, 2010
QotD: The emergence of the Tea Party movement
There’s something else that’s been making me very happy lately, and frankly I don’t give a chipmunk’s cheeks who knows or what they may think about it. After years, decades, what even seems like centuries of unremittingly putrescent political news, we are suddenly all witnesses to the spectacular emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement.
The Tea Parties are just one of a number of historically pivotal developments (including the Internet, conservative talk radio, and perhaps even on-demand publishing) that became necessary to get over, under, around, and through the Great Wall of the Northeastern Liberal Establishment and its numberless, faceless hordes of duly appointed gatekeepers.
In that sense, the Tea Parties are exactly what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left always aspired to be and never really were.
Just like each of those other developments, the Tea Parties are essentially a medium of communications. So far, they are leaderless and centerless (and at all costs, must remain that way). They have no founders, and no headquarters. They have no constitution, no by-laws, and no platform to argue over endlessly. More conventionally-minded politicrats might view all of these qualities as weaknesses, but they would be mistaken. As presently (un)constituted, Tea Parties can’t be taken over by high school student government types or mercenaries from the major political parties, who have nothing better to do with their lives.
I would point out, especially in the light of the recent Bob Barr embarrassment, that this arrangement is inexpressibly better suited to libertarians and to libertarianism than any formal, hierarchical structure copied from the other political parties (and I have been doing exactly that for almost thirty years) but that would be a digression.
L. Neil Smith, “My Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-31
October 26, 2010
Did we just witness the start of “Tea Party Ontario”?
Steve Paikin looks at the unexpected toppling of incumbent mayors across Ontario yesterday:
Did we just have our own “tea party” Ontario?
All over the province, incumbents were feeling the wrath of the electorate.
In the capital city, Rob Ford cruised to victory, besting George Smitherman by more than 90,000 votes. His margin of victory was bigger than David Miller’s when he “swept” into office with his broom seven years ago.
But it wasn’t only Toronto. Incumbent mayors lost in Hamilton, Ottawa, Burlington, Vaughan, London, Thunder Bay, and Sudbury.
In Mississauga, where Hazel McCallion is accustomed to winning with more than 90% of the vote, she only won re-election with 76%.
[. . .]
A few weeks ago, none of these results was seen as obvious.
[. . .]
The conventional wisdom in local politics is that name recognition counts for so much. The power of incumbency is fantastic.
Not last night. If anything, the opposite was true. If you were in, you had a target on you. And precious few escaped it, including many incumbent city councillors in Toronto.
A stunning night for upsets. A big night for turnout (more than 50% in Toronto…twice the normal turnout rate).
An Ontario Tea Party would be a good idea . . .
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April 21, 2010
Is the Tea Party movement racist?
An interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how a charge of “racism” works, even when there’s no actual racist action involved:
Blogger Conor Friedsdorf notes that there is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to the Blow approach [. . .]
Or, for that matter, to any nonpolitical institution that aspires to become more inclusive. Imagine Kelly O’Donnell questioning a black man in a largely white company or university or country club or suburb the way she interrogated Darryl Postell. She would come off as clueless and prejudiced — as, come to think of it, she does. (Kudos to NBC for airing this revealing though embarrassing footage.)
The political left claims to love racial diversity, but it bitterly opposes such diversity on the political right. This is an obvious matter of political self-interest: Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party.
[. . .]
These charges of racism are partly based on circular reasoning. Among Blow’s evidence that the tea-party movement is racist is “a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday [that] found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic.” Other polls have put the black proportion as high as 5% (and, as Tom Maguire notes, Blow misreports his own paper’s Hispanic figure, which is actually 3%). But with blacks constituting some 12% of the population, there’s no question that the tea-party movement is whiter than the nation as a whole.
Yet to posit racism as an explanation is to ignore far more obvious and less invidious causes for the disparity.
H/T to LibertyIdeals for the link.
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February 11, 2010
October 8, 2009
You keep using that word . . .
Jesse Walker writes:
A writer named Mike Elk has produced an entry in that venerable genre of contrarian-liberal writing, the “We Should Talk with the Right-Wing Grassroots Rather Than Demonize Them” essay. I’m always in favor of open-minded conversations that cross ideological lines, so in theory I applaud what he’s doing, but I had to chuckle at this tone-deaf sentence:
It’s time that we raise up above immature name calling and start talking to the teabaggers.
I’m sure Elk was genuinely unaware that the Tea Party marchers consider the word “teabaggers” an especially obnoxious example of “immature name calling.” Nonetheless, he sounds like an earnest Special Olympics volunteer who doesn’t understand why his “Go, retards!” chant isn’t catching on.
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August 22, 2009
Right wing nutbars, observed
P.J. O’Rourke tries to save readers the effort of reading the Washington Post coverage of recent town hall protests:
So there was Rick Perlstein calling everyone to the right of Nikita Khrushchev a candidate for the state psychiatric ward with Alec MacGillis playing his KGB Bozo sidekick, firing blanks and honking his “End-of-life care eats up a huge slice of spending” airhorn. Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes.
Givhan writes a column called “On Culture,” and this is what passes for culture at the Post: “Of the hundreds of thousands of style guides currently for sale on Amazon, not one . . . was prescient enough to outline the appropriate attire for those public occasions when good citizens decided to behave like raving lunatics and turn lawmakers into punching bags.” Meeting with Givhan’s scorn were “T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm.”
I’ve never seen Robin Givhan. For all I know she dolls herself up like Jackie O. But I have seen other employees of the Washington Post and — with the exception of the elegant and, I dare say, cultured, Roxanne Roberts — they look as if they got dressed in the unlit confines of a Planet Aid clothing-donation bin.
Perlstein, for all the highness of his dudgeon, doesn’t catch the nuts saying anything very nutty. The closest he gets to a lunatic quote is from a “libertarian” wearing a holstered pistol who declares that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.” And those are the words of lefty icon Thomas Jefferson. I myself could point out the absurdity of protestors’ concerns about government euthanasia committees. Federal bureaucracy has never moved fast enough to get to the ill and elderly before natural causes do. And what’s with those “birthers”? Why their obsession with a nonentity like Obama? How about John Adams with his Alien and Sedition Acts choke-hold on the First Amendment? Or Jefferson? He could tell his Monica Lewinsky, “I own you,” and he wasn’t kidding. Or John Quincy Adams, pulling the original Blagojevich, buying the presidency from Henry Clay? Or that backwoods Bolshevik Andrew Jackson? Or William Henry Harrison, too dumb to come in out of the rain? Not one of these scallywags was born in the United States of America — look it up.
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