So who is the Cato & Reason crowd donating now?

Lots of mainline Republican milquetoast of the Scott Brown variety, and a single Rand (but not Ron) Paul.

BOAZ, DAVID D ARLINGTON,VA 22201 CATO INSTITUTE/EXECUTIVE - 6/28/11 - $600 - Term Limits America

CALABRIA, MARK WASHINGTON,DC 20009 CATO/POLICY ANALYST - 10/19/10 - $250 - Rubio, Marco (R)

CRANE, EDWARD H III WASHINGTON,DC 20001 CATO INSTITUTE/PRESIDENT - 5/15/10 - $500 - Campbell, Tom (R)

CRANE, EDWARD H MR III FALLS CHURCH,VA 22044 CATO INSTITUTE/PRESIDENT - 8/2/10 - $1,000 Paul, Rand (R)

CRANE, EDWARD H MR III FALLS CHURCH,VA 22044 CATO INSTITUTE/FOUNDATION EXECUTIVE - 6/24/11 - $1,000 Flake, Jeff (R)

DOLAN, GREGORY PITTSBURGH,PA 15222 CATO INSTITUTE/RESEARCH ANALYST - 9/30/10 - $1,000 Eagle Forum

DOLAN, GREGORY FRANCIS WASHINGTON,DC 20004 CATO INSTITUTE/ANALYST - 9/24/10 - $500 - Family PAC

LAMPO, DAVID ALEXANDRIA,VA 22314 CATO INSTITUTE/PUBLICATIONS DIRECTO - 4/16/10 - $250 - Berry, Matthew B (R)

LAMPO, DAVID WASHINGTON,DC 20001 CATO INSTITUTE/DIRECTOR - 5/27/11 - $250 - Brown, Scott P (R)

MACEY, JONATHAN R WOODBRIDGE,CT 06525 CATO INSTITUTE/LAW PROFESSOR - 1/21/10 - $500 - Simmons, Rob (R)

MITCHELL, DANIEL J MR FAIRFAX,VA 22030 CATO INSTITUTE/SENIOR FELLOW - 11/18/09 - $250 - Lauber, Elizabeth "Liz" (R)

SHAPIRO, ILYA WASHINGTON,DC 20001 CATO INSTITUTE/LAWYER - 3/31/10 - $250 - Kelly, Jesse (R)

SHAPIRO, ILYA WASHINGTON,DC 20001 - CATO INSTITUTE/SENIOR FELLOW IN CON - 4/27/11 - $250 - Hasner, Adam (R)

SHAPIRO, ILYA MS WASHINGTON,DC 20001 CATO INSTITUTE/WRITER/ATTORNEY - 2/11/11 - $250 - Cruz, Ted (R)

WARD, GAYLLIS NEW YORK,NY 10025 CATO INSTITUTE/DIRECTOR OF PLANNED - 1/14/10 - $250 - Brown, Scott P (R)

POOLE, ROBERT W MR JR PLANTATION,FL 33317 - REASON FOUNDATION/POLICY RESEARCHER - 6/30/10 - $500 - Malpass, David (R)

YBARRA, SHIRLEY WASHINGTON,DC 20037 - REASON FOUNDATION/ANALYST - 5/12/11 - $250 - Allen, George (R)

Cato goes fishing for Soros dollars

You read that right. The same Cato Institute that can't seem to bring itself to welcome Ron Paul to its stage invited George Soros to give a lengthy and horribly wrongheaded speech on F.A. Hayek earlier this week.

I can only guess what's next from the world of Cato WTF. Perhaps a speech on Adam Smith by Hillary Clinton?

A Giant Flaming Hypocrite

Outside of his odd political friendship with David "pop goes the" Weigel, James Kirchick is best known in libertarian circles as the public face of the Ron Paul newsletter smear story of 2008.

You may recall that Kirchick, who is openly gay, took particular offense at Paul's 1980's era newsletters over their insensitivity towards AIDS, which he in turn interpreted virulent homophobia.

For all the verbal lashing he gave Ron Paul, poor little Jamie apparently has few qualms about his own peculiar association with the Claremont Institute, which publishes his neoconservative saber rattling along side its intellectual leader Harry Jaffa's proclamations that "Sodomites should be returned to the closet, where they were of relatively little danger to themselves or others." In fact, Claremont is well known as a hotbed of virulent anti-homosexual commentary, and aligns firmly with the Christine O'Donnell wing of the Republican Party. But they also like warmongering bluster, hence their affinity for the Giuliani-ite Kirchick.

For all the cosmotarian fruitloops out there who hid behind shallow claims of "principle" while smearing Paul over thinly alleged associations and innuendos of anti-gay bigotry, I have a simple question: Will you hold your little friend Jamie to a similar standard for his hypocritical Claremont Institute dalliances?

Back on Suffragette City

The gift of David Boaz's recent PC-tarian fiasco continues to produce, including a thoughtful rejoinder from Jacob Hornberger himself. Not content to let the matter drop though, Boaz along with Cato's in-house pretend philosopher have issued their own answers. One could easily pick apart their particulars, and I will momentarily, but a general point needs to be made from the outset. The relationship between the individual and the state is the heart of the libertarian political philosophy, and it is both the history and nature of the state to intrude upon the individual's liberty. Even when exerted against a group or class of people, the state's actual intrusion occurs on the individual level against his individual rights, that individual simply happening to belong to a group. A discriminatory law is therefore not wrong because it offends a broad, abstract, and often vaguely defined collective attribute of many individual persons such as race, class, religion, skin color, or sexual preference. It is wrong because of what it inflicts upon the individual liberty of that person, the attribute of his race, class, etc. being only the occasion of its infliction.

Boaz and Wilkinson fundamentally mistake the nature of "racism," "sexism," and all the other negative isms that are commonly use to collectively define a category of infringements upon the rights of the individual, and do so by confusing the targeted characteristic for the individual himself, against whom the actual physical wrong is committed. Such mistaken orderings amount to little more than crudely formulated displays of identity collectivism, and as the simple substitution of "class" for "race" et al illustrates, they are fraught with with fundamentally Marxian premises.

It should also be duly noted that Boaz et al completely neglect another important dimension from their crude historical analyses, to wit: the embrace of classical liberalism as an intellectual movement. Even as the 19th century in practice fell far short of its libertarian ideals, those same ideals flourished in its intellectual culture. Is it simple coincidence that the century to which Hornberger refers produced such luminaries as Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Carl Menger, Lysander Spooner, Alexis de Tocqueville, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry George, William Graham Sumner, and dozens of other like-minded thinkers on whose work much of the modern libertarian movement of today rests? Is it also of little significance that many of these same thinkers were roundly embraced and celebrated as the leading minds of their day? Given what bilgewater passes for "intellectual thought" in the present day, perhaps the 19th century was a "golden age" of sorts after all.

On to the particulars though...

After acknowledging that Hornberger made absolutely no specific longing to pre-1865 America but rather the 19th century in general, Boaz, with Wilkinson's assistance, attempts to modify and extend his argument from blacks to women (and gays and every other Politically Correct category of shared human attributes). Thus they rant about Hornberger's supposed neglect for those who lacked "meaningful rights to political participation" and so forth. Hornberger makes no such neglect save for benign omission of a point so self-evident that it need not be harped upon, though harpies his interlocutors happen to be. It causes wonder, however, to witness the likes of Boaz and Wilkinson in their apparent reduction of the measure of a free society into something so ultimately meaningless and so notoriously fraught with statist manipulation and irrational displays of misplaced exuberance as the elective franchise. The people may elect an Obama and they may vote themselves a welfare state, but by golly they exercised a "meaningful right to political participation" and therefore must be freer than the past when such franchise was not universal! Briefly setting aside overwhelming evidence that the expansion of mass democracy in the United States only gave rise to bigoted populist windbags with a propensity for statist intrusions upon liberty, both economic and personal, there is a delicious irony to be found in its use as a measure of a free society by two individuals who frequently announce their own disgust with the ballot box, or sing praises of others who abstain from this largely frivolous act.*

*This writer has long tended to concur with Spooner's observation that "man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist" and therefore only exercises the franchise to obtain "some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own." But such thoughts may be beyond the comprehension of persons who fundamentally conflate collective identity politics with the inherent antagonism of an individual's relationship with the state, and what the latter says of his own free exercise of rights.

That much duly noted, it is similarly mistaken to respond, as Wilkinson does, that in 1880's America "well more than half the population was systematically and often brutally denied basic liberty rights" on account of the state's own discriminatory policies against persons of targeted racial, class, and gender attributes. One may duly denounce the feudal era English common law concept of coverture impeding female property rights, yet also recognize what Wilkinson does not, namely that (1) such laws were drastically diminished through the enactment of Married Women's Property Acts and Privy Examination statutes in the majority of states between 1809 and the early 1850's, (2) the 19th century in general saw a marked liberalization of laws regarding women's rights in general including the elective franchise, which preceded the federal 19th amendment on the state level by upwards of 5 decades in some cases, and (3) no necessity exists to assert that all 19th century females would find themselves little more than the status of slaves because their husbands, to whom it may be fairly assumed a large number were happily married, retained a stronger legal standing to contract in a court of law.

Jim Crow, which was again a sin of government against the individual at the most fundamental level, serves to fully illustrate the fault of government even when it is comparatively smaller than today, though again its wrong is so self-evident to the libertarian that harping upon it serves little legitimate purpose beyond an artificial attempt to quash an argument that one also happens to be losing. Of course even the most horrendous acts of overt state segregation against blacks (which actually reached their peak amidst the inflamed populism of the early 20th century's "Progressive Era," not the comparatively benign, even if far from perfect, political era that preceded it) did not completely deprive them of economic freedom. Indeed, this was the central point of Booker T. Washington's autobiography, "Up From Slavery," and the defining message of his thoroughly libertarian career as an educator and thinker: Permit us, as individuals, to better ourselves through the exercise of economic freedom...which brings us to a second bit of irony, wherein Boaz apparently missed the entire message of the same work whose title he appropriated to make his original dig at Hornberger.

What next, Boaz? Slavery Reparations?

In case you may think David Boaz's recent attack on Jacob Hornberger is anything other than evidence of a recurring pattern in which he exhibits a full-fledged subscription to the intellectually slothful doctrine of Political Correctness, he has now joined the cadre of usual suspects in denouncing Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's proclamation of "Confederate History Month" for failing to include a hollow "feel good" apology for slavery.

The actual policy effect of an addendum condemning slavery is of course meaningless, and its sole purpose is an act of shallow political pandering to a wholly un-libertarian interest group of professional race-baiters who make their livelihoods in manufacturing racial controversy and using it to manipulate the political system in a thoroughly statist direction. The Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons are not worth the time, energy, or even attention of any thinking libertarian. But Boaz knows that, and is apparently quite okay with pandering to them nonetheless. Boaz also knows that any thinking individual recognizes the inherent evil of slavery, and need not dwell upon restating it to the detraction of all further intellectual discourse on any historical subject it may have tainted. For the same reason, we need not qualify every single discussion of murder with a boiler-plate condemnation of the inherent evil of murder. Or of rape. Or of theft at gunpoint on the side of the road (except when it's the government doing that theft, and the gun-toting highwayman also carries a badge). All thinking people know these wrongs to be obvious, thus eliminating the need to incessantly restate them...unless an entirely different purpose is sought or intended from their repetition.

The next pressing question then is whether Boaz recognizes that ulterior purpose (as a reputed intellectual he likely does), and if so does he adhere to its statist tenets in advancing it?

PC-tarianism

For all its internecine squabbles, the libertarian movement has thus far managed to remain relatively insulated from the leftist cultural phenomenon known as PC, or Political Correctness. The reason is not difficult to isolate. The underlying premise of Political Correctness is the belief that the essence of every individual is his or her collective association with a group - a race, a gender, a sexual preference, a religion, a medical affliction - and that membership in that group fundamentally defines his or her interaction with all other levels of society, which is to say other collectively identified groups. In such a setting moral right and wrong is taken to derive not from acts infringing upon the rights of individuals or causing them injustice and harm, but rather acts that are perceived to infringe upon group identities and group sensibilities - including group sensibilities taken to a radical extreme in which even the most obscure perceived slight is construed as "racist," "bigoted," "homophobic," and simply social taboo. And as is typical of such social paradigms, certain persons are also designated the victims of history, the perpetually oppressed, though not as individuals but rather through their membership in a certain collective group. And for every perpetually oppressed is a perpetual oppressor group, compared to which no greater evil exists.

Starting to sound uncomfortably familiar? Substitute the word "class" for "race," "proletariat" for "black/gay/hispanic/non-Christian," and the word "bourgeois" for "rich white male" and you get a better picture from whence the nonsense of Political Correctness originates, and why it exists in such self-evident contradiction with libertarianism.

Yet the PC bug is a pernicious one, and it too has started to infect our movement. Its carriers come with little surprise, though two particular PC-tarians have been unusually aggressive of late: David Boaz and Tom G. Palmer. Boaz has long toed the politically correct line, dating back almost a decade to his bizarre Jesse Jacksonite crusade against the Mississippi state flag over its Confederate imagery. And readers of this blog already know of Palmer's bizarre Confederate fixation, which rears its ugly head even when such a topic is neither appropriate to the discussion at hand, nor even relevant to the muddled point he seems to be making. Each also recoiled in feigned horror over the manufactured Ron Paul newsletter "controversy," which "offended" them far more than even the most statist elements of the tax and spend big government socializing Bush and Obama administrations. (In fairness, Boaz assures us that he does not ever vote for candidates who support the Warfare-Welfare state or trample on personal liberty...he just donates to their campaigns instead). But today's Boaz rant, promptly endorsed by Palmer, was far more insidious, in that it attacked a fellow libertarian not for anything he said that may have been construed as offensive. Instead, the Palmer-endorsed Boaz screed attacked its target for what he did not say (and what he had no reason or need to say as it was of little relevance to his point).

Boaz's point of outrage? An innocuous column by the Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger on the decline of individual liberty in America. Boaz's objection centered around Hornberger's demonstrably valid contention that the United States of the 19th century was generally a time of smaller government, freer markets, and less overbearing and omnipresent federal intrusion into the daily lives of its citizens. To make his point Hornberger referenced a widely revered historical figure, that most libertarian of the primary founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. What, precisely, was the offending passage? Evidently the following:

First of all, let’s talk about the economic system that existed in the United States from the inception of the nation to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations, licensure laws, drug laws, immigration controls, or coercive transfer programs, such as farm subsidies and education grants. There was no federal department of labor, agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, or homeland security.

And just what was so wrong with that passage, and with citing Jefferson? Well as any PC Nazi will tell you, by simple omission Hornberger defied the PC paradigm in which all of American history is a pattern of weaker groups exploited by strong, wealthy, greedy, white males. Since Boaz evidently subscribes to that PC paradigm, he finds a fault in Hornberger's silence on slavery. And he then uses that silence to lump Hornberger into some sort of association with all those dirty rotten "neo-confederates," whatever that may be (other than a not-so-vieled pejorative reference to the Mises Institute, which Boaz gratuitously inserts in the middle of his discussion) who join "organizations" and argue that the Union win in the Civil War was a bad thing on the net for liberty. Mockingly, Boaz queries: "Did Mr. Hornberger really forget that 4 million Americans were held in bondage when he waxed eloquent about how free America was until the late 19th century?" Though he quickly backed away from further implying Hornberger to be a closet slaveocrat, simply asking this question cannot be construed as anything but an insult. Not to mention a suggestion that Hornberger has violated PC norms - a suggestion that Boaz reaffirms several times over by qualifying any and every good thing Hornberger has to say about the smaller government of the past with the usual list of all the classes and groups and ethnicities and sexual preferences that didn't get to enjoy all that liberty.

Now Slavery is an unconscionable wrong to any thinking libertarian. It's wrong is also so self-evident that Boaz's very line of questioning exudes all the intellectual sophistication of the Keith Olbermanns and Al Sharptons who pretend to see a sheet and a burning cross behind every critic of Obamacare...or Obama for that matter for no other reason besides the fact that Obama is black. And that is what makes Boaz's attempt to tar Hornberger so noxious. Nothing in Hornberger's column actually merits the scorn Boaz heaps upon him over slavery, and yet Boaz finds a "sin" in the very absence of evidence that such a "sin" was committed.

What's worse though is Boaz is even being dishonest about Hornberger's supposed neglect of historical slavery. True, it was not the subject of the column to which Boaz responded. But Hornberger has written about historical slavery many times before, and in strongly critical terms. Here is what he said about slavery in another column only a few weeks before the one Boaz found so objectionable:

The neocon mindset about Muslims is much like the mindset of plantation owners in the Old South. As long as the slaves were obedient, respectful, and subservient, everything was fine. Oh, sure, slaves would periodically complain about their condition in life but, by and large, such complaints were considered acceptable. What was not acceptable was resistance and opposition to slavery itself, especially when it turned violent. That was when a message had to be sent. Such an uppity attitude simply could not be tolerated.

Clearly then the root of Boaz's objection is not any legitimate quibble over Hornberger "forgetting" about slavery, but rather that Hornberger did not make slavery the singular focus of his historical discussion as the PC paradigm dictates.

But even to Boaz's rather shaky point there is a flip side. For all the fault and complicity to be found in the government-sustained institution of slavery, it is also a disservice to history to allow that fault to perpetually overshadow and thus forever taint the very real beacons of liberty and limited government we may find by looking to the American past. At stake is no less than the question of whether the events of 1776, in casting off perpetually warring, colonizing, and tax-feeding leviathan, may be considered a human advancement in the classical liberal concepts of free markets and free and limited government. If we cast aside all forerunners such as Jefferson, and dismiss the generally limited government and free market liberalism of the pre-20th century America for its fault of slavery, and if we embrace a need to ostracize other libertarians not for any actual defense of slavery but for the contrived "sin" of omission found in failing to incessantly harp upon it throughout all discussions of liberty throughout American history, then with what else does that leave us?

Stated differently, if we must always and explicitly qualify every instance historical liberty with its most egregious historical violations simply for the sake of paying those violations deference whether doing so is germane to the discussion or not, we also effectively taint and negate any value that may be gained in a comparison to the freer particulars of the past. In doing so we also necessarily resign ourselves to a position that true individual liberty is unattainable, for we are qualifying every past instance of liberty's existence, and every libertarian characteristic that the early American republic actually did exhibit, by reducing them all to the moral equivalence of that same republic's least free attribute. Boaz may not admit as much, but he spends his entire screed skipping, hopping, and dancing around this very conclusion.

It is no mystery why libertarian thinkers of much greater intellectual capacity than either Boaz or Palmer could make this distinction in their own day, even when dealing with the very same subjects that Boaz and Palmer now employ in their PC meanderings. They recognized what Boaz and Palmer do not - liberty is not a sales pitch to the slothful minds of modern political discussion, consumed in fraudulent outrage and hyper-emotional displays of offense and "hurt" over matters of frivolity.
It is not a trendy affectation of self-proclaimed enlightenment, meant to cultivate a personal image of sophistication and acceptable company. Liberty is an inherent condition of the individual, and its presence or absence is measured by that individual's relation to his fellow man under the auspices of that which asserts itself to govern him.

Even the great libertarian Lysander Spooner recoiled in horror at the outcome of the Civil War and the loss of the Confederacy - not because he disagreed with that which it affected of slavery, namely his lifelong quest for its destruction, but because it came about through authoritarian means and at a much larger and distinctly un-libertarian price. The reason for his objection was found in government, the antithesis of liberty:

"Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? Or what government, except one resting upon the sword, like the one we now have, was ever capable of maintaining slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general - not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only "as a war measure," and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white...There was no difference of principle - but only of degree - between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve."

One need not look far for clues of what Boaz might say of Spooner if their lifespans traversed, as it would probably consist of "reminding" the lifelong abolitionist that he had "forgotten" about the 4 million slaves.

Or what would Boaz say of Lord Acton, who in 1866 wrote Robert E. Lee to inform him "I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization, and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo." Judging by his snide remarks, he would probably dismiss the British philosopher as a "self-proclaimed" libertarian and perhaps a "neo-Confederate" engaged in the business of denying the "magnitude" and indeed overarching primacy of all things slavery, all things race, all things class, all things Politically Correct, and all things mired in the overtly Marxian analytical device of labor-reductionism in which an entire "social and economic system" is said to be defined and predicated upon the exploitation of a laboring class, with any and everything else about it that may commend itself to liberty being wholly subordinate and thus subject to dismissal.

But Acton and Spooner were genuine libertarians. They recognized the centrality of the individual's relationship with the state to his own liberty, and could accordingly explore the depth of that relationship beyond its worst (and best) particulars. Boaz and Palmer are PC-tarians who generally share and even occasionally advance on their common ground with liberty, but only through the accident of a mutual disdain for government...at least on paper. To PC-tarians, race and class and gender and religion are conversation stoppers, their finer details and the roles they play in human interaction an unexplorable taboo that must recieve unyielding elevation above all further (and thereby precluding all further) discussion. Hornberger's real "sin" was therefore not that he neglected slavery, but that he pushed the conversation of liberty beyond the constraining effects of the PC paradigm.

Libertarian Electoral Stupidity

Chalk this one up to more self-defeating libertarian electoral stupidity. The morning brings news that Charles and David Koch, the benefactors of a dozen or so libertarian outfits in the DC region, are fund-raising for neoconservative U.S. Senate candidate Trey Grayson in Kentucky. Grayson, of course, is running behind in the polls for the Republican primary against Rand Paul, son of the Texas congressman.

Now I'm personally less inclined than the Rockwellites to doubt the Koch brothers' libertarian bona fides. Even at their weaker moments, the organizations in the Koch empire are generally very free market and for limited government. And as far as eccentric billionaires go, the Kochs are pretty damn good most of the time and deserve credit for that. They could be George Soroses after all, or any number of other statist left-leaning rich guys who use their money to fund pure evil. But the decision to back Grayson has Rockwell incensed, and legitimately so. It's in the same category as all those Reasonoids who endorsed Obama. Or the Cato scholars who donated to the likes of George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and William Weld (hint hint, David Boaz). It's one of those moments where you simply have to say WTF.

Rand Paul is a rare thing in modern electoral politics. He has libertarian bona fides, funding, and most importantly of all the polls show he has electoral viability. Any thinking libertarian should embrace that, regardless of petty internal differences over his father. Instead we simply have another example of libertarians shooting their own. And yet we wonder why we're perpetually confined to the periphery of the American political system.

Of course the Koch revelation may have at least one more immediate implication for the Kentucky Senate campaign. It completely takes the wind out of Grayson's attack ads claiming that Paul's campaign is funded by "out of state libertarians." Or does Koch Industries get exempted from that label?

On Rockwell and Rosa Parks

You can always tell when Tom Palmer's various medical afflictions are flaring up, because he invariably trots out his favorite piece of "evidence" of the secret racist bogeyman he sees constantly lurking around the Mises Institute: Rosa Parks.

To hear The Libertarian Thinker (tm) describe it, one would think that the Rockwellites must have performed some sort of virtual lynching on the well known civil rights movement icon. Here's Palmer's most recent attribution of this reported event:

Put this in context of the bilious hatred directed toward those who stood up for civil rights by, among others, his colleagues at the Mises Institute, Rockwell, DiLorenzo, and Huebert. Their remarks about...Rosa Parks, one of the most elegant advocates of American freedom in the past sixty years, give you a hint. (She wouldn’t “get off her fat lazy ass” was their interpretation of her motives for not giving up her seat to a white traveler when informed that it was required by “law.”) It’s a part of a very disturbing pattern.

Sounds pretty nasty, don't it? That's cause Palmer, as he is prone to do, intentionally and willfully misrepresented his attributed quote as an act of malicious racism. In reality, the Rockwellite "interpretation" was nothing of the sort. Rather, it was an inoccuous blog post that quoted a simple JOKE about Rosa Parks by comedian Cedric the Entertainer in the well known movie Barbershop. Palmer completely ignored this context, despite the fact that the Rockwell blog explicitly identified its author as Cedric in the part that he intentionally truncates from his oft-repeated "fat lazy ass" quotation. As may be readily seen, that context is everything. Without it the comment looks like a crude and racially charged insult (which is what Palmer intends). With that context and with its actual author identified though, it becomes a well known comedy bit. Again, hear it for yourself right here.

Palmer, of course, knows this, which makes his own repeated misrepresentations of it all the more malicious and deceitful in their own right. That is because Tom G. Palmer is a congenital liar who is so pent up with hatred against Rockwell that he can't even recognize a well known joke from a highly grossing movie. Not that Palmer would ever attack somebody else for failing to see the humor in a joke of his own telling...

What goes around...

Reason's erstwhile cub report David Weigel has an interesting couple of pieces up at the Washington Independent about his facebook pal Marcus Epstein, one and the same with yesterday's Palmer contrivance.

It seems that the far left has taken to using Epstein's name in a fashion very similar to Palmer, to wit: as a tool to beat their adversaries over the head by way of a guilt-by-association "racism" smear. In this particular case the target is not Lew Rockwell, but rather James O'Keefe - the fellow behind those ACORN prostitute scandal videos and, more recently, a bizarre incident that resulted in his arrest at Sen. Mary Landrieu's office. O'Keefe, it seems, was a former co-worker of Epstein at the Leadership Institute and, while there, attended a debate that Epstein organized between National Review's John Derbyshire and some silly self-important tool from the American Renaissance outfit. This, plus Epstein's Mel Gibson moment of course, make O'Keefe a closet Klansman...at least according to the logic employed by the likes of Tom Palmer, ACORN, and the People's World Daily.

Weigel, to his credit, actually puts up a very reasonable and measured defense of O'Keefe:

I’ve known campus conservative activists for a decade, and I know the people who put together the 2006 forum quite well. Extremism — theories about race, right-wing European politics, anti-immigration rhetoric — is seen in these circles as something of a lark. It’s forbidden knowledge. It terrifies liberals. But people like Marcus Epstein and James O’Keefe feel (or felt) like they can get away with playing around in these circles before getting down to serious politics. And once they make that leap — as Epstein did with Buchanan, or as O’Keefe did with his ACORN tapes — the idea of being brought down by controversy is laughable. They’d faced down the Southern Poverty Law Center and won, so what do they have to fear?

...[C]an the tactics conservatives used to attack Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings or Green Jobs Czar Van Jones–digging into their associations, reporting that they attended scary-sounding events, finding out-of-context, radical-sounding quotes from their earlier careers–be used against conservative activists?

That last sentence is the kicker, as it highlights the absurdity of these tactics. Unfortunately they are also tactics Weigel knows quite well, though he didn't seem to make that rather obvious connection.

The fruit doesn't fall far from the loop

The libertarian movement's crazy old uncle has another screed up today, apparently attempting to provoke a spat with the Rockwellites. Though the theme is typical and predictable, i.e. scream that Rockwell is a "racist bigot homophobe" on the flimsiest of evidence, the timing is curiously atypical.

First the background. The post in question concerns a story about a young man named Marcus Epstein. Sometime circa 2007, Epstein went through a severe bout of mental depression and developed a drinking problem. While stammering home one night in a state of alcohol-induced incoherence, he allegedly said the dreaded n-word to a black lady he encountered on the street. The incident occurred in Washington D.C., which has one of those "hate crimes" laws and Epstein was charged with a violation. He eventually pleaded it away by declining to contest the charges. Those who knew him attested that the incident was clearly alcohol-induced, and out of character for him. He nonetheless tendered the expected round of apologies, which the world would have likely never even noticed save for the fact that Epstein was a staffer at the time for a Republican political action committee, which he then left to take the heat off his bosses. Again, note that the incident itself occurred in 2007 and the political fallout concluded around June 2009 when the legal case was closed and Epstein resigned.

It is now February 2010 and the story is old news. Enter Tom Palmer, who has almost certainly never done anything he regrets while intoxicated (not that he bothered to disclose the pertinent detail of alcohol in his retelling of Epstein's Mel Gibson moment). As readers of this blog (or the other blog) are sure to note, The Libertarian Thinker (tm) has been taking a beating as of late over his bizarre fixation on Rockwell. This fixation never really goes away with Palmer, as some things never do. But the Rockwell one has flared up in recent weeks. Hence him trotting out the Epstein case.

Why? Because in Palmerland, Epstein's impolitic outburst simply *must* be attributable to the tutelage of Lew Rockwell. His evidence, if it can even be called that...well...it turns out that while he was an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, Epstein posted a couple articles on Rockwell's voluminous web blog (including a glowing profile of the black libertarian poet Zora Neale Hurston). The most recent of them appeared in 2005, making Epstein the veritable Dauphin to Rockwell's blogging empire, no doubt.

But alcohol is not all Palmer declined to mention. Rockwell's site was not Epstein's primary publisher, or even his most recent. In fact, this kid published far more frequently with the typical run-of-the-mill op/ed factories that permeate the right-of-center press in this country.

Epstein wrote for such "racist fringe" periodicals as Human Events, Townhall.com, the Independent Review, and the Washington Examiner...or basically some of the very same outlets that Palmer himself routinely cavorts with...and conveniently uses to pad his shallow "Curriculum Vitae."

So why isn't Tom Palmer telling us that Epstein's nut doesn't fall far from the tree of the Independent Institute? Or that he's putting Human Events' secret racist ideas into practice? That he's proselytizing some spooky "racial collective" agenda that was hatched in a secret cabal by the Leadership Institute, Townhall.com, and National Review Online's John Derbyshire?

Or for that matter, why don't we simply tar Tom Palmer himself with Epstein's outburst? Palmer did, after all, publish, grant interviews to, and receive praise and favorable book reviews from many of those exact same sources. Hell, Palmer's current employer even hosts events with Epstein's former employer, which in turn hosted an event attended by racists according to some far left blog that carries banner ads for the Communist Party, thereby demonstrating once and for all that Palmer simply must have secret yearnings of his own to deliver crudely worded racial insults to the black people he encounters on the streets of Washington. And that he's also a secret communist.

Wait, that's not enough proof for ya? Well we don't need no stinkin' proof. Because this is exactly how these absurd Palmeresque guilt-by-association games work. Quod erat demonstrandum.