I’m loath to disagree with Virginia Postrel–she’s extremely bright and a great writer, as well as putting out the best issues Reason has ever seen–plus she is a total babe…but I digress. In this post questioning the motives of Kerry-leaning libertarians, she falls down hard, and unfortunately I have to take issue:

I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerry-leaning libertarian hawks (now that’s a small demographic!) are simply kidding themselves in order to stay on the fashionable side of politics.

The thrust of her argument is that Kerry is indeed a classic Massachusetts liberal who wants to socialize this, raise taxes on that, and basically had his economic understanding frozen at the height of Eugene V. Debs’s influence on the Left. So electing him is dangerous compared to Bush. As evidence she quotes his focus on nationalizing health care through providing federal insurance.

Errr…Kerry is no Clinton, but then Clinton had a certain, more far-reaching health-care proposal that went nowhere against the Republican congress. The fact of the matter is that we would talk less about Clinton’s centrism were he saddled with the 98th Congress instead of the 104th or later. So the gridlock argument is not one to be brushed aside lightly.

The upshot of it is that both Bushes put Clinton to shame in the social spending and federal regulation realm…liberals ought to be in love with the Bush family. If only it weren’t for that pesky war and religious superstition dictating social policy!

With regard to the Iraq war, I’m not in the libertarian hawk set that Postrel mentions–though I was not against the war before it happened, neither did I think it a good idea at that time. And now I think it was a lousy idea and events have proven war opponents right and hawks wrong, even assuming coverage of the war and its aftermath has been skewed.

But I certainly do have problems–big problems–with Bush’s domestic policy. He embodies everything I hate about conservatives and liberals (ironically my take on Al Gore as well). So I’l be voting for Kerry to get Bush out of office. I don’t pretend it will be a positive good, but at this point less bad is a much better option.

And as far as the specious argument that being anti-Bush is cool: come on, if libertarians wanted to be cool, they would stop being libertarians. Being an anti-Bush libertarian wins you few if any friends–more like toleration from the Left, and condemnation as a traitor from the Right. It would be much cooler to be some sort of granola Peace Corps hippy–and I’d find more social acceptance as an unthinking Christian evangelical.

In short, nobody becomes libertarian because it’s cool, so once they’ve made the leap to libertarianism, you have a large burden of proof to show before you can claim that any other policy position they take is due to fashion rather than an honest assessment that it’s right. Move from Dallas to here in the DC area and see just how cool you feel as any sort of libertarian, pro- or anti-Bush.

CNN has a story about an FBI contract translator’s wrongful dismissal case being dismissed because the evidence needed to prove the case one way or the other is secret.

Now, having at one time held a piddling Secret clearance, I can tell you that a lot of stuff that is classified is bogus…at most it needs to be classified for about 72 hours and then it is worthless. Details of Hillary Clinton’s itinerary in various trips she made abroad, as far as I know, are still Secret…even though they’re published in the press and over for several years. (No, this is not the Secret material I had access to, just an example.)

However, there are cases in which the testimony would not be best left out in the open (“Well, since the Aurora pictures taken at Mach 9 with our image enhancement technology show the defendant’s license plate on the car moments before it blew up, we’re relatively sure it was him.”). But why can’t these cases be handled by specially cleared judges who are cleared Secret, Top Secret, and a special few who are code-word cleared?

I would prefer open trials in most cases–but the idea that a case is dismissed because the government says, “Uh, no, that’s a…secret…yeah, that’s the ticket,” is even more repulsive to me.

Until then, let’s change regimes at home so the trend has a chance to reverse–and vote those bums out if they don’t reverse it.

(See, Mike? It’s not hard, and I didn’t quote anybody out of context. Loads of reasons to vote against Bush–it’s like taking candy from a baby.

Hmmm…I’m hungry.)

I was going to write something about how, even though I think in retrospect I was stupid to assume the Bush administration knew anything about Iraq that your average PoliSci undergrad didn’t, I’m not going to bother to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

However, my favorite movie critic has done it for me, and said it better than I would have.

The key line is this:

Two Fingers for Fahrenheit 9/11. I hate Bush, but I have better reasons than this.

Ditto.

This entry in the Washington Times about flight attendants still being trained to submit to hijackers has made me more angry than anything I’ve seen in a long time.

Exactly how big of an idiot do you have to be to realize that the risk/reward ratio for resisting hijackers has changed forever to the side of reward? The reward is: possibly living. The risk is: possibly dying. The risk of doing nothing is almost certainly dying, and the benefit is, you may get to live until your plane is used as a murder weapon for people on the ground.

This, if for no other reason, is why I’m a libertarian. It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a government to tell that child to allow people to murder him and others.

This is morally, rationally, ethically, and even aesthetically indefensible. The only moral framework from which this can be argued is pacifism (which I view as immoral, as it basically aids and abets murder by not opposing it in any meaningful way), and I highly doubt the same government who will try to throw you in jail for “embarrassing” them or invades the nation of Iraq because they didn’t like the cut of their leader’s jib is operating on the principle of pacifism.

Remember, if you’re for nationalized health care, you want the same decision-making quality that went into the TSA in charge of your cancer treatment: “It’s best not to treat cancer because there are nasty side-effects.”

Thank you.

No, really. I mean it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Things were starting to look bad there for a while, what with Spain leaving what little of a coalition we had and John Kerry gaining in the polls. I thought I might have to move to Russia to institute the kind of foreign policy I dream of.

But you’ve saved me.

Every time you lop off a head, you make people that much more unsure they want to object to unilateral action against you people. Even if we’re not getting anything done, we can be seen to be Doing Something, and every beheading makes Abu Ghraib a little less bad by comparison.

So please, I beg of you, keep it up. I don’t want to have to move to Russia, because it’s so full of damn dirty Slavs and other untermenschen.

Your pal in conflict and big budgets,
Paul