Key words: “used to”.
Now a libertarian is a kook. Like the poster child of all libertarians:
Ron Paul.
Both Silberman and Sutton cited Scalia’s opinion in 2005 upholding strict federal regulation of marijuana in the case of Angel Raich, a Californian who used home-grown marijuana to relieve her pain. “If Congress could regulate Angel Raich when she grew marijuana on her property for self-consumption,” Sutton wrote, “it is difficult to say Congress may not regulate the 50 million Americans who self-finance their medical care.”
http://mobile.latimes.com/p.p?a=rp&m=b&postId=1165037
“Key words: ‘used to’.
Now a libertarian is a kook”
That makes no sense. Historical Buckley hasn’t changed, if “libertarian” has, though I’m not really sure it has. it depends on who you’re comapring, of course, as it’s a relative term. But Buckley wasn’t in the libertarian wing of our post-war conservative intellectual movement. That would be left more to Chodorov, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard, Rand, etc. Buckley I’d categorize as having a foot in that door, but more firmly in the traditionalist and anti-communist camps.
Buckley had positions in common with Paul, for instance being against the Iraq war and the drug war. However, probably scanning for his name on Paulbot websites would yield screeds against him as a CIA plant and crytpo-fascist stalking horse. Which goes to demonstrate how hard it is to lump people together just because they happen to have in common one or a couple of things within the cluster known as libertarianism.
Certainly, denying him the label “conservative” requires more justification than not, given the long tradition of doind so, whether or not he was a drug warrior. Hard to believe in the Age of Bush, but, yes, libertarianism and conservatism overlap. And, yes, the sort of libertarianism represented by the big, bad Paul.