A Stitch in Haste

I don't read DailyKos for the same reason I don't read Hardy Boys books: there's no reason to. Neither adds anything to intellectual discourse; neither catalyzes the self-enrichment of the already-literate. DailyKos is the radical leftist blogger equivalent of poi: no taste or consistency whatsoever, but it helps the other, more substantive content last longer.

The latest self-humiliation by Moulitsas (who, recall, is supposedly a leading advocate of the fiction of "left-libertarianism") and his Cult of the Childish Pejorative:

For all the talk of "freedom" that the Paulbots claim to believe in, they sure as heck have been silent on the horrible FISA bill we're fighting to fix in the Senate right now. Same for Ron Paul. Why the silence? And the CATO people and the libertarian publications like Reason, where are they?

Here we are engaged in a huge civil liberties issue, and progressives are being forced to fight this thing alone. It's easy to talk about "liberty". It's much more impressive to actually do something about it.

That was, incidentally, the entire post.

It's true that I haven't blogged about FISA for a long time — by which I mean six days. It's true that "Terror v. Civil Liberties" (which I have also called the "War on Civil Liberties") is only one of my blogpost categories — have I no shame? It's true that my (non-exhaustive) chain of warrantless wiretapping posts "only" contains fifty entries, each of which is more substantive than Moulitsas' post by "only" an order of magnitude — what kind of libertarian am I?

More responses at Reason, Distributed Republic, Publius Endures.

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Moulitsas is of course as popular as he is precisely because he's so intellectually unsophisticated. Nothing appeals more to the Great Unwashed than an unwashed argument.

And nothing demonstrates this better than the kindergarten playground / tantrum factory that is his comments section:

--Why do Libertarians care so much about liberty from taxes, but not from oppression or government interference in one's private affairs? If they genuinely gave a crap about civil liberties ... well, they wouldn't all be Republicans, anyway.

--The truth is that many so-called libertarians just don't really give a damn about civil liberties.

--A libertarian is mostly a Republican who supports gay marriage and wants to smoke pot.

--I'll say it again — "libertarians" are simply wingnut Republicans trying to describe themselves in more fashionable terms. That's all they are.

--There is no such thing as a libertarian. It's simply a fictional concept put together in the abstract for purposes of argument, but there are no actual, real senitent [sic] beings who actually believe in classic "libertarianism", as we academically understand the word.

--The majority of Libertarians I've run across seem to only believe in liberty for themselves. The rest of the world can go to shit so long as nobody tells them what to do, takes their money, or interrupts their masturbatory fantasies of being rich by expecting them to do anything that is not ultimately self-serving.

--Libertarians just hate taxes and minorities and want to live in gated communities.

--Libertarianism is Pre-School for Republicans.

--This goes to the very heart of the libertarian philosophy. Not the one they profess, but the one they actually hold: Not giving a shit about others.

And that's just a sample of the high-brow discourse in the thread. As is always the case with sundry partisanship: when enemies are in short supply, they must be manufactured, like any other scarce good.

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This one's my favorite, incidentally:

George Bush was the libertarian that the Randoids dreamed about, I mean he was the John Galt who cut taxes, got rid of regulations and hell, he is doing a heckavajob with New Orleans and Baghdad so some future Howard Roark can do some work there.

Actually, I've long thought that George W. Bush was eerily reminiscent of "Mr. Thompson," who is clearly the President in the novel, though I believe that word is never used to describe him:

Head of State and a crafty pragmatist who believes everyone is open to compromise. When his goons capture Galt, Mr. Thompson tries futilely to persuade the inventor to take charge of the collapsing economy, tempting him with money and the trappings of power. When that fails, Mr. Thompson finally agrees to use torture.

Remind you of anyone?

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Meanwhile, I blogged previously:

Those political mainstreamers who do not share in this movement-that-Paul-did-not-create, the liberals and conservatives who prior to this presidential campaign had barely heard of an "isolationist / neoconfederate / 95% of all blacks are criminals / bring back the closet / Lincoln started the Civil War / the WHO invented AIDS / conspiracies everywhere" fervor now have — thanks to Ron Paul — a name for it: libertarianism.

Well, you can imagine how many times the words "Ron Paul" and "libertarian" appear together in the contributions to that don't-think-too-hard-it-hurts comment thread.

So now we have two radical anti-libertarians — Paul and Moulitsas — going out of their way to misrepresent libertarianism though a bizarre, self-contradicting hybrid of straw man attacks and guilt by association. They must really be scared of us.

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Turning now to our right flank: If we "sell our souls for a tax cut" libertarians are all in cahoots with the Republicans, then whence this?

The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life. By teaching that 'greed is good,' strict free-market ideology holds out the promise that private vices can be public virtues.

The ironic part is that this wood-paneled-den drivel, written by infantile radical conservatives, could just as easily have been written by the infantile radical liberal Moulitsas. There would have been no way to tell without a byline. Go figure.

I repeat: They must really be scared of us.