Everybody is a Libertarian All of a Sudden
What a bunch of Johnny Come Latelys losers.
Where the eff were you Libertarians when George Bush was blowing up shit will nilly, establishing the department of homeland security, saying illegal wire taps were great, getting rid of habeas corpus, adding billions to the national debt, and trying to legislate morality? You have your panties in a knot over every little thing Obama does because, “holy shit the slippery slope is gonna git-cha!” (paraphrase)
But Bush, bought the country a ticket to Libertarian Hell and set up a tea party there for eight long years, and you guys were like little church mice, because OH GOD THE TERRORISTS!!
What a joke your pathetic movement is.
I was paying attention the entire Bush maladministration and I never heard a peep from local or national libertarians. Somebody find me a libertarian site that was prominently anti-Bush. Just one. I beg of you.
Either the is no real Libertarian Party or you guys seriously suck. Or, you know what? You are really Republicans, but are sick of being looked at funny so now you call yourselves Libertarians. Same wingnut bullshit, new package. That’s probably it.
Three minutes on LP.org, the official party site, turned up multiple statements criticizing Bush’s record, particularly on civil liberties issues.
Angry much? I thought your guy won.
The problem with the Libertarian Party is they can’t agree on what they stand for. Ask 100 Libertarians to define Libertarianism and you’ll receive 100 different answers. I’m still confused.
I was very anti Bush for many years. Just not a blogger for most of it. His policies were contributing factors in my decision not to reenlist int he Air Force.
Bill Maher is a libertarian, correct?
I didn’t think Maher was affiliated with any party.
silly pandy
The problem with the Libertarian Party is they can’t agree on what they stand for. Ask 100 Libertarians to define Libertarianism and you’ll receive 100 different answers. I’m still confused.
The problem with the Democrat Party is they can’t agree on what they stand for. Ask 100 Democrats to define Libertarianism and you’ll receive 100 different answers. I’m still confused.
(marxists, progressives, moveon, codepink, DLC, bluedog…)
The problem with the Republican Party is they can’t agree on what they stand for. Ask 100 Republicans to define Libertarianism and you’ll receive 100 different answers. I’m still confused.
(neo-con, paleo-con, moderate, reaganite, libertarian, countryclub, logcabin)
Libertarianism = Utopian fantasy.
“Ask 100 Libertarians to define Libertarianism and you’ll receive 100 different answers” Sounds very Jewish to me. 🙂
“Where the eff were you Libertarians when George Bush was blowing up shit will nilly, establishing the department of homeland security, saying illegal wire taps were great, getting rid of habeas corpus, adding billions to the national debt, and trying to legislate morality?”
Out on the street protesting, and down in the trenches working to elect candidates who, unlike Democrats, actually believably promised to put a stop to that shit.
Where were you?
I second that one Von Cracker
jason,
You have an incredibly short memory for your own embarrassments.
On 24 April you wrote:
You know Steve your indignation is hilarious. I don’t know how many times I thought, “Well this Bush outrage, at long last will get the libertarians stirred up,”
Only to hear crickets.
I responded:
Your standard and your response are ridiculous.
Hube is not a libertarian, as far as I know.
And it’s pretty difficult for you to hold me responsible for “not speaking out” prior to November 2007 when I started a blog precisely to speak out about that and other issues. Before that, you’d have had to come to my classes, or read articles in homeland security circles, to find me speaking out on a regular basis.
The fact that I didn’t choose to join your little blogfest until November 2007 doesn’t equate with moral or intellectual silence. It only equates with the poverty of your intellectual world view: only what you happen to hear has any relevance.
FYI: as I have proven to you on multiple occasions, if you go back and check the archives of the national LP website, you will find that libertarians have been consistently against the trashing of the constitution since they first opposed the original Patriot Act. Did you? And if so, where can we read about it from 2001-2002?
And you then replied
Sorry Steve. Just checked out that page you mentioned. I guess I took your party’s utter impotence for acquiescence.
To anticipate your next point, I know that the Democrats were pretty impotent throughout as well.
The whole interchange can be found here:
http://delawareliberal.net//2009/04/24/around-the-horn-friday-6/#comments
So you can either allow your original apology of three months ago to ride, or you can create a new one. Either way, you really should check your own notes from time to time before you start to spew.
Owned. Game, set and match to Newton.
Hardly. Unless you, like Steve, are holding up “utter impotence” as a virtue. .
Ah
jason (“I know that the Democrats were pretty impotent throughout as well”), in an incredible exercise of intellectual futility, manages to ignore his own words.
Keep going, guy. It’s hard to run from your own apologies.
Steve,
The point of my post is that Libertarians are either grossly incompetent (to the point of not even being a real political party) or they are Republicans.
You simply can’t dispute that. That fact that I am in inelegant rhetorician doesn’t change anything.
If you care to address my point and keep the gamesmanship for class, Im all ears.
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jason
You don’t have a point: you have a two-party system that–due primarily to the collusion of Democrats with Republicans–structurally prevents any third party from emerging while funneling millions of Federal tax dollars to the Dems and the GOP for partisan political purposes (for example, both the Dems and the GOP bellied up to the bar and took $14 million of Federal tax money to put on their conventions).
There is currently a bill in the DE General Assembly to make it more difficult for a third party to be ballot qualified.
Don’t give me your happy horseshit about libertarians being a failure as a political movement when your own party entered a long-running, monopolist deal with its own opposition to keep the two of them enshrined as the only games in town … forever.
You hypocrisy of this subject is beyond gamesmanship–you have admitted that Libertarians protested Bush abuses as long ago as any Democrats did, and when I call you on it–using your own words–it’s suddenly me playing word games?
Face it: you wrote an idiotic post for a friendly audience and forgot that you had undercut your own premise three months ago. That’s not being an “inelegant rhetorician,” that’s the politician in you: what I said last week doesn’t matter.
Oh come on Steve, you can’t really expect Jason to weigh facts and evidence and come to a reasoned, logical conclusion. He lacks the intellectual capacity to do so.
He acts very much like a politician. No principles, consistency, or regard for the truth.
“The point of my post is that Libertarians are either grossly incompetent (to the point of not even being a real political party) or they are Republicans.”
Lord knows you’ve gone to great lengths to constantly paint Steve and any other Libertarians as Republicans / Republican apologists. In Steve’s case in particular you’re lying out your ass, but that certainly doesn’t seem to stop you.
Steve,
If “the collusion of Democrats with Republicans–structurally prevents any third party from emerging” what are Libertarians doing about it besides jumping in bed with Republican Presidents who are about as libertarian as Fidel Castro?
But I will grant one thing. I was writing angry. I was warming up to fraudulent Libertarianism after your Gates comment the other day and hearing a little about Wendy Jones. Then reading Wendy’s right wing screed I came down to earth with a thunk and realized that there is not much distance between Libertarians and Republicans and that probably accounts for why Libertarians were so docile under Bush.
Mike W,
You are an excellent example of my original point. To read your comments nowadays you seems like a very upright libertarian leaning Republican.
It is a joke of course. When the President was a Republican you were all too eager to express your police state sympathies. Thanks for commenting.
The ultimate in Libertarianism was created in Poland with the Librum Veto. Any member of the
national legislature could veto any measure and even force the body to resolve. This was an era when Polish territory was desired by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. “Partition” was inevitable.
There is an asymptotic form of libertarianism (note the small ‘l’) in which the principles are guideposts rather than ultimate destinations. A person who navigates using a compass may not want to visit the magnetic poles but uses them as a point of reference.
The anti-Second Amendment fetish of some self-styled ‘progressives’ certainly reeks of authoritarianism and goes against libertarian principles. We saw the ‘progressives’ on the Supreme Court go against property rights in Kelo. Some addle-pated Republicans supported ‘Campaign Reform’ that was an oblique attack on the First Amendment.
The list can go on.
The Republican party remains the best vehicle for advancing libertarian principles.
Bill Maher is a glib leftist fraud. The name of his former show “Politically Incorrect” reeked of gross intellectual dishonesty.
Oh – I thought Wendy Jones was a “Librarian.”
Never mind…
art Downs knows intellectual dishonesty when he siees it
Actually, folks, our system is one which encourages a two-party system. In a winner-take-all system like ours, factions will emerge which seek to reach a vote total of 50%-plus-one of the electorate. The result is that eventually there will be only two main factions will remain — broad coalitions of sub-groups with competing ideologies within them. Only if we re-jiggered the system to one with proportional representation — and perhaps a parliamentary form of government — would that change.
Only if we re-jiggered the system to one with proportional representation — and perhaps a parliamentary form of government — would that change
Would this really be a good thing? Do we want to have unstable coalitions where fringe parties can call the shots? Over the course of our history, we have seen major parties vanish. The first two-party system vanished when the Federalists bit the dust. Then the Democratic-Republicans ended the Era of Good Feelings with the branching out of the “Anti-Jackson” faction that became the Whigs. The Whigs split into the Republican and Know Nothing parties. The ‘Bull Moose’ run of TR elected Wilson.
The four-way race in 1948 turned out to be a victory for common sense with the election of Truman for a full term.
We have been spared the rigid party system of the Europeans and people are seldom expelled from either party,
Maybe we should have a 10-party system, like Italy; where it takes a coalition of Marxists, Jacobins and Skinheads to pass a bill opening a new zoo.
So Jason have John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and numorous other dems been run out of the party for voting for Iraq and the Patriot Act yet.
C’mon, conservatrolls, sing together: “We got nothin’! Oh, yeah, we got nothin'” Everybody sing!
Libertarianism appears to be a temporary compromise, with overlapping ideologies, caused by a backlash against excessive authoritarianism in the government.
Jason, you have something wrong in your post. It was the Democrats who were voting with President Bush. The Libertarians were about the only ones raising objections. I personally think that the President was right about most of those issues. If you want to debate me and my fellow Republicans, fine, but don’t act as if the Libertarians who were the only voices of dissent were Johnny’s come lately.
I’m not a libertarian, but this is bullshit on my DirecTV bill today:
Important Tax Information Effective 8/1/2009, Delaware has implemented a 2.125% Public Utility Tax on direct-to-home satellite services authorized in House Bill 288. The new tax amount is included in the “Sales Tax” line item on this monthly statement.
F! HB 288 and those that voted for it…the airwaves ought to be free….I am all for fairness, but nickel and diming your citizens to death is not the right way to do things…..
John – that was bringing the satellite services in line with the cable and fiber optics services. Yup. Not justifying it, just explaining it.
Yes, I know and it still sucks and not because I have to pay it. It’s my dish at my house capturing FREE AIR. not a cable run to my door….just a weak, but crafty way, to stick it to the working man and woman….