Rachel Maddow the Accidental Libertarian

Anti-Statism, Democracy, The Basics
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I just recently watched The Daily Show‘s interview of Rachel Maddow from last April (embedded below) and couldn’t help but comment. She proposed two rules for public discourse: 1. “Don’t lie” and 2. “Don’t threaten to shoot people or encourage the shooting of people.” I was surprised – Maddow and I rarely end up in agreement, yet I couldn’t agree more that the world would be a much better place if everyone stuck to these two rules when speaking in public forums. I knew, of course, that Maddow could not possibly be serious or had not thought too hard about her second proposal. The implications of that rule, though perhaps not immediately obvious, are staggering.

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The “Ground Zero Mosque” and the Prospects for Liberty

Immigration, Vulgar Politics, War
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The furor over the “Ground Zero Mosque” (which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero) doesn’t make me very optimistic about the prospects for liberty.

As a libertarian and just a live-and-let-live kind of guy, I can’t imagine caring much about, let alone vocally protesting, what someone is building two blocks away from me.

Yet apparently many of my fellow Americans are such busybodies that they’ll whine for weeks about something being built hundreds or thousands of miles away from them, in a city where they don’t live and probably won’t even visit. And many of the complainers are among the Tea Party set whom we are occasionally told are “libertarian,” even though they seem to hate Muslims and Mexicans and love war at least as much as they hate the federal government and love liberty.

Jonah Goldberg claims that the conservatives who object “mostly” recognize that the Muslims have a legal right to build their center. But what I hear on talk radio makes me doubt this. A common argument there seems to be that since “liberals” don’t care about the constitution or property rights in general, they aren’t entitled to invoke them now — as though liberals somehow have the power to waive Muslims’ rights.

In any event, even if Goldberg is correct, it’s hard to imagine that the spirit of liberty resides in the sort of people who get so worked up over this sort of thing. The ease with which they’ve been distracted by this issue suggests that reducing government isn’t going to be their top priority once their team is back in control in Washington.

(Cross-posted on my blog.)

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I Guess It’s the Singer, Not the Song

Corporatism, Imperialism, Vulgar Politics, War
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Newt Gingrich, self-appointed “teacher of civilization” and de facto leader of the neo-con lynch mob, in an op-ed piece he co-wrote for National Review:  “Far from defeating terrorism, today’s government-to-government foreign-aid system can actually incite it by propping up corrupt and repressive one-party states.”

The views of Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, alleged covert jihadist and anti-American radical, as summarized in a June 23, 2004 interview with Chris Hedges of the New York Times:

“On June 23, 2004, [Imam Feisal Abdul-] Rauf told Chris Hedges, then a writer for the New York Times: `Islamic terrorists do not come from another  moral universe … they arise from oppressive societies that … Washington had a hand in creating.'”

If  the view Rauf expressed makes him a fellow traveler with jihadis, wouldn’t this mean that “Mr. Newt” is an apologist for Islamic terrorism?

Of course, what’s really going on is that Newt is promoting a taxpayer-subsidized form of micro-colonialism called Free Cities. Through that “private” initiative (which would actually be a form of international corporatism), the blessings of free enterprise, “limited” government, and protection for individual rights would supposedly be extended to hapless foreigners by the same entity — the Regime in Washington — that is the most powerful enemy of the same.

Gingrich may be history’s purest specimen of cynical political opportunism. As a recent Esquire profile makes clear, he doesn’t really believe in anything, other than his qualifications to tutor the rest of us.

Like Lenin, Gingrich is adept at identifying and exploiting grievances — or creating them ex nihilo. He is many loathsome things, but “stupid” isn’t in that inventory. Gingrich knows that he’s spewing unfiltered nonsense about the “mosque at Ground Zero,” and that he’s engendering hatred toward a moderate, establishment-centered Muslim cleric whose “radical” views aren’t that different from his own.

It’s doubtful that those at the terminus of the human centipede-style GOP propaganda cloaca will recognize that fact.

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Imperial Doublespeak About Iraq

Imperialism, Mercantilism, Vulgar Politics, War
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In a series of Orwellian twists, the United States is pulling out (prematurely some say) “all” “combat” troops from Iraq but doubling down (for starters) on mercenaries.

The Obama Administration gets away with “fulfilling” Obama’s promise to end US combat operations in Iraq by removing the last (officially-labeled) combat brigade from the country, yet 50,000 troops will remain until (supposedly) 2011. These 50,000 troops make up 7 “Advise and Assist” Brigades, which are brigade combat teams like the one that just left but with special training, and 2 combat aviation brigades. “The troops are officially there to assist and advise the Iraqi government, but will carry weapons to defend themselves and will join Iraqi troops on missions if requested.”

After 2011, the “military” presence in Iraq is supposed to be “limited to several dozen to several hundred officers in an embassy office who would help the Iraqis purchase and field new American military equipment,” but military officers are saying that “5,000 to 10,000 troops might [still] be needed.”

Meanwhile, “the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000.” Can we really still call security personnel ‘civilians’ or ‘private security’ anymore when they’re working for the state in foreign lands, particularly in a combat zone? They’re mercenaries, troops that are conveniently not part of the official US military. The NYT reporter couldn’t help calling them “a small army of contractors.”

The US is building military bases, fortified compounds, outposts, and the largest “embassy” in the world in Iraq. Iraqi politicians still haven’t been able to come to an agreement and form a government after the last elections, making Iraq vulnerable to a coup if the Iraqi military leadership get too frustrated by the ineffectual, in-fighting politicians. The US empire will not be completely out of there anytime soon.

But hey, “we” won…right?

~*~

Update: Less than a week after the official end of combat operations in Iraq, US troops were involved in a combat operation in Iraq. Go figure. 12 people died and dozens were wounded in an assault by heavily-armed militants against an Iraqi military headquarters, in the center of Baghdad no less.

~*~

Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.

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