It's pleasant to see the phrase in print, but whatever libertarian leaning is going on isn't enough to capsize the USS Business-As-Usual.
Show me 75 GOP congress critters who will risk their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honors (t' hee) -- not to mention the Dantesque horror of losing an election -- to dismantle the Departments of Education, HUD, HHS, and Energy. Then, if they will also vow to risk their all to end the War on Drugs (which has been lost since, roughly, the day Bill Clinton didn't inhale), why, then I'll agree the GOP caucus might be trending toward libertarianism.
But let me repeat my pleasure in seeing even the word "libertarian" so high in a national story. Are we approaching the end of the era requiring us to explain that, no, it is not a misspelling of "liberal?"
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Down a little lower we run into one of those sneaky, perhaps unconscious, one-word editorials in a "news" story.
"Boehner already has a somewhat wary alliance with several younger and more dogmatic GOP members. "
Dogmatic? Would the writer have used that word to describe some hard-core leftist congress critters? Of course not. The required adjective in those cases is "principled."
Show me 75 GOP congress critters who will risk their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honors (t' hee) -- not to mention the Dantesque horror of losing an election -- to dismantle the Departments of Education, HUD, HHS, and Energy. Then, if they will also vow to risk their all to end the War on Drugs (which has been lost since, roughly, the day Bill Clinton didn't inhale), why, then I'll agree the GOP caucus might be trending toward libertarianism.
But let me repeat my pleasure in seeing even the word "libertarian" so high in a national story. Are we approaching the end of the era requiring us to explain that, no, it is not a misspelling of "liberal?"
---
Down a little lower we run into one of those sneaky, perhaps unconscious, one-word editorials in a "news" story.
"Boehner already has a somewhat wary alliance with several younger and more dogmatic GOP members. "
Dogmatic? Would the writer have used that word to describe some hard-core leftist congress critters? Of course not. The required adjective in those cases is "principled."
1 comment:
I see a big difference between libertarian and constitutionalist. Perhaps I'm misreading the Tea Party movement, but as a subset of people who want the established law to be absolutely followed by everyone (doesn't sound too libertarian to me), all the Tea Partiers are asking is that maybe the government could spend a little less money--maybe enough so that there'd be enough separation between the lines drawn in the pie graph of the total expenditures to show a little color.
Since this involves arguments that could challenge the power to tax granted to the Congress by the Constitution--actually just the wisdom of the (rough estimate) 60,927,823,384.42 taxes flushed down the non-accountability toilet known as the general fund, instead of say 2.2 trillion diverted to maintaining roads--this means that Tea Partiers are evil extremist terrorists that should be in prison.
I suppose Congress could be introduced to the constitutionally-imaginary concept of Second Amendment-style granted powers or rights, as has been lectured to the unwashed masses by the Federal Department of Alternative History. I bet we could make up those budget shortfalls with taxation permits and also thrown in for good measure some citizen tax safety commissions, mandatory background checks, one tax-a-month limits and mandatory tax waiting periods.
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