{"id":6160,"date":"2010-11-03T12:13:55","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T16:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=6160"},"modified":"2010-11-03T11:24:50","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T15:24:50","slug":"liberty-consistency-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/11\/03\/liberty-consistency-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberty: consistency matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole<\/a>, after suddenly discovering a man-crush on Marco Rubio, outlines how the Tea Party can still succeed:<\/p>\n

\n

[. . .] I\u2019d suggest that the key lesson of yesterday\u2019s 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\u2019s growing antipathy towards Big Government will take care of the rest. Christine O\u2019Donnell 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t understand it in the first place — then hello, a second term for President Obama, and bye bye Western Civilisation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n

If you are against Big Government, you are for liberty. If you are for liberty you are also for free citizens\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don\u2019t like and encourage you things you do like: that\u2019s 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\u2019t necessarily disapprove of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole, after suddenly discovering a man-crush on Marco Rubio, outlines how the Tea Party can still succeed: [. . .] I\u2019d suggest that the key lesson of yesterday\u2019s 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\u2019s growing antipathy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,10,53,13],"tags":[119,186,322,199,327],"class_list":["post-6160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-liberty","category-politics","category-usa","tag-drugs","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-nannystate","tag-prohibition","tag-teaparty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1Bm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6160"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6162,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6160\/revisions\/6162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}