Crush Liberalism

Liberalism: Why think when you can “feel”?

Props to Bubba for challenging Truther

Yes, I said that Bubba deserves credit for this.  I may never say that again, but I call it like I see it.  From WCCO:

Clinton’s 50-minute speech, which started about an hour behind schedule, was derailed briefly by several hecklers in the audience who shouted that the 2001 terrorist attacks were a fraud. Rather than ignoring them, Clinton seemed to relish a direct confrontation.

“A fraud? No, it wasn’t a fraud,” Clinton said, as the crowd cheered him on. “I’ll be glad to talk to you if you shut up and let me talk.”

When another heckler shouted that the attacks were an “inside job,” Clinton took even greater umbrage.

“An inside job? How dare you. How dare you. It was not an inside job,” Clinton said. “You guys have got to be careful, you’re going to give Minnesota a bad reputation.” 

Minnesota has a bad reputation for a number of things, like entertaining the notion of sending moonbat and not-that-funny “comedian” Al Franken to the Senate, not to mention them sending Keith Ellison to the House.

Bubba’s still a slimy SOB, but on this single occasion, I give the man his due. Troofers iz dum!

October 25, 2007 Posted by | Bill Clinton, moonbats | 2 Comments

Recovering Libertarian

This is an awesome column by Stephen Green that I certainly relate to and that really got me thinking.  Please read the column, excerpts of which follow:

… Being a Libertarian was hard work, but I set right at it. I even went so far as to read the entire party platform. Pro-choice? Right on! Free trade? Hell, yes! Privatize all the schools? Start with mine! Abolish that Social Security Ponzi scheme? I was never going to see a dime, anyway! Bring all our troops home from Europe and Japan and South Korea and everywhere else and close half our embassies and cut defense spending at least in half and forget about enforcing freedom of the seas? Whoa, Nelly! “But,” I rationalized, “they don’t really mean all that stuff. A Libertarian president wouldn’t be that naive.”

But come election day, I held my nose, covered my eyes and pulled the lever for George HW Bush — no easy feat with only two hands. There was still a Cold War to be won. I could be a real Libertarian — we all would be! — once the Soviets caved in.

Almost exactly a year later, that’s exactly what happened. On November 9, 1989, the people of East Berlin took hammers and chisels and even their bare hands to that Wall. Soon, the governments of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and even Romania had fallen — mostly peacefully. The peoples of Eastern Europe had liberated themselves from Communist oppression, and at long last I was free to throw off the last shackles of my Republican heritage.

I changed my party affiliation to Libertarian, smiling all the way back from the voter registrar’s office.
…
In 2000, I changed my party registration back to Republican for one reason, and one good Libertarian reason only: To vote against John McCain (and his statist threats of campaign finance reform) in the primary. I fully intended to switch back before the next general election.

Then we all woke up one morning to learn that airliners had crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and into the wooded hills of Pennsylvania. “Well, here’s a war even a good Libertarian like me can support.” We’d been attacked, directly, and we knew who the culprits were and where their protectors and sponsors were. We would go after them with such righteous fury that no one would dare strike New York City ever again.

Boy, was I wrong.

The angry folks at Liberty were mad at most everybody but Islamic terrorists. One even went so far as to denounce the Afghan War as “racist.” It was all imperialism this, and blowback that, and without a care in the world for protecting American lives, commerce, or, well, liberty. Then Postrel turned over Reason to Nick Gillespie, who seemed more interested in presenting libertarianism as something hip, arch, fun — and ultimately unserious. Such should have been no surprise, coming from the former editor of a magazine called Suck.

I felt abandoned, betrayed, by my comrades. By my former comrades.

If Libertarians couldn’t agree about the clear-cut case for war in Afghanistan, you can imagine how Iraq must have divided us. I had to stop reading Liberty months before my subscription finally, mercifully, ran out. Blogger friends of mine stopped emailing me. Ron Paul, whose name once graced the back of my first car, started sounding to me, less like a principled defender of American liberty, and more like a suited-up reject from the Summer of Love. …

When I started this blog in 2004, I idenitified myself as a libertarian.  Since then, I’ve noticed that while I am libertarian on a number of issues that conservatives reject (such as legalization of prostitution and drugs), I am conservative on a number of issues that libertarians reject (I support the war against Islamic terrorism, I’m not reflexively anti-religion, etc.).  I eventually identified myself as neo-libertarian, which may be a more accurate description.  Or perhaps, I can best be identified as either (a) a libertarian with conservative leanings; or (b) a conservative with libertarian leanings.

In other words, I think that we are all entitled to life, liberty, and property that cannot be denied or deprived without due process, and we should be able to exercise those rights in any manner that we see fit so long as the exercise thereof doesn’t infringe on other people’s rights to do the same.  I also think that without a strong national security system (which libertarians tend to trivialize in importance), all of our rights and freedoms mean nothing.

October 25, 2007 Posted by | libertarian | 5 Comments

Criminal aliens stealing fire relief supplies

From San Diego:

Six illegal immigrants who were suspected of stealing relief supplies from Qualcomm Stadium were arrested by Border Patrol agents after San Diego police stopped them Wednesday morning.

A woman who had been evacuated to the stadium told officers she saw the group load up two pickup trucks and a car with cots and other supplies, leave and then return, said police Sgt. Jesse Cesen~a.

When officers stopped them, a member of the group said they were being paid to take things of value from the stadium.

“They were stealing a lot of stuff,” Cesen~a said. “We took the stuff back and we escorted them out. They were stealing from the people in need.”

Because some members of the group spoke Spanish, officers called Border Patrol agents at the stadium for relief efforts. They determined the people were in the country illegally and arrested them.

I wonder if this is what Jorgé W. Bush had in mind when he said “jobs that Americans won’t do”? If so, he’s correct: I don’t know any Americans who would steal emergency aid (not counting those who work for the U.N., I mean).

I also wonder if a former friend of mine considers these officers to be “quacking” bigots for arresting the thieving hombrés.

October 25, 2007 Posted by | illegal immigration | Leave a Comment

TNR: The Army publicized documents that…uh…we wanted publicized!

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here we have TNR trying to blame the Army for TNR’s own malfeasance.  As Allah characterizes it, “TNR very angry that Army didn’t let them pretend Beauchamp conversation never happened.”  Observe:

Reminds me of when Dan Rather said, in the midst of Rathergate, with a very straight face, that if the memos turned out to be fake he’d like to be the one to break that story.

Sometimes those big scoops need to be “helped along” a bit by outside parties, n’est-ce pas?

Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic, said in an interview that the documents Matt Drudge posted this afternoon–and removed several hours later without explanation–could have only come from the Army.

Mr. Foer said he called TNR’s contact there, Major Kirk Luedeke, as soon as the documents appeared on Drudge’s Web site. According to Mr. Foer, Major Luedeke told him that the Army was “investigating the source of the leak,” though they did not explicitly take responsibility for it.

“It’s maddening to see the Army selectively leak to the Drudge Report things that we’ve been trying to obtain from them through Freedom of Information Act requests,” Mr. Foer said. “This fits a pattern in this case where the army has leaked a lot of stuff to right wing blogs.”

Mr. Foer said TNR had been trying since July to get access to some of the documents Mr. Drudge posted, but that the Army had not cooperated.

So Foer couldn’t report on a conversation he himself participated in because the record wasn’t complete yet? Re-read that transcript again. Foer and Scoblic are telling Beauchamp, with no little amount of desperation, that they’re going to have to walk away from the piece if he doesn’t talk to them. Which he doesn’t. By their own formulation his protracted “no comment” is hugely significant and thus, one would think, should merit some kind of mention in TNR, whether or not a new report might be warranted later if further documents were released.
…
Their defense here is obviously going to be that Beauchamp did offer to “talk” to them, sort of, by promising to release the statements he gave to the Army and that they were simply waiting until they had that material to report the conversation. But … why don’t they have that material yet? Beauchamp agreed to release it to them in part 2 of the transcript, but here we are six weeks later and still no report from TNR. Like Ace says, there are only two possibilities:

1) Beauchamp never authorized the release of these documents to TNR, and TNR is trying to claim the Army has a special duty to give them to TNR, even with Beauchamp stubbornly refusing to sign the release.

2) Beauchamp did authorize the release of all documents specifically pertaining to himself, which is all he could authorize, but that authorization does not cover the statements made by other troops in the unit. So TNR is spinning its failure to get permission from the other soldiers to view their statements as A) due to Army non-cooperation and B) absolving them from having to report any further on the story until they get these documents (which they never will).

They’re “waiting for all the facts to come in” before they do any further reporting on the story, in other words. And since there are no more facts forthcoming, voila: story’s over. Frankly, I’m surprised the Army didn’t leak Beauchamp’s statements and the report of its investigation to TNR just to call their bluff and force their hand.

Update: Says See-Dub, “So we are to believe that the army was previously stonewalling on these documents that show that A: the troops aren’t psychopathic dog-smashers and B: their effete liberal critics were printing falsehoods about them? Documents numerous sources had already FOIA’d? But now they ‘leak’ it?”

Update: Captain Ed’s on the same wavelength. “Just the fact that TNR needed an FOIA request to find out what the Army discovered should have informed them of Beauchamp’s credbility.” 

To summarize: the Army is evil for killing dogs, mocking disfigured women, etc., and then they’re evil again for not letting TNR’s slander go unanswered by proving (to the MSM’s chagrin) that the Army doesn’t kill dogs or mock disfigured women.  Got it?

October 25, 2007 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

   

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