A Stitch in Haste

Reading Wall Street Journal editor James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" screed is a lot like driving past a car crash: you know what you'll see will likely repulse you, but you just can't help looking.

Today, in regards to some obscure academic hissy fit about whether there is such a thing as "the Israel lobby" (answer: of course there is), Taranto raises up a Straw Man of Babel toward conservative heaven:

It seems to us [David] Bernstein has an incomplete picture of libertarians. He probably thinks of them as cute little nerds who have basically sound (if somewhat extreme) ideas about economics along with various eccentric enthusiasms: private toll roads, pornography, drugs, head-freezing. This is the libertarian world of Reason magazine. ... But libertarianism is an ideology. Ideology can lead to fanaticism, and fanaticism to hatred.

So let me see if I understand Taranto's "Reasoning" (pun intended) correctly: A man I've never heard of, associated with a think tank I've barely heard of, writes an op-ed piece about a subject for which there is no obvious default position for libertarians. That, plus a five-year-old Reason article about people who want to clone their dogs, yields the conclusion that all libertarians are potential hate-filled fanatics? And this is coming from a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal?

It is no secret that the Journal editorial board has, like so many others in the Republican establishment, abandoned libertarianism in recent years, choosing instead to embrace the radical social conservative elements (e.g., anti-gay rhetoric and laments about "activist judges" appear on the Journal's op-ed pages with depressing frequency). But is the puerile name calling and the hopelessly strained and twisted logic really necessary?

We libertarians already know you don't like us anymore, conservatives — there's no need to get, um, fanatical about it.