Posted on 01/24/2014 12:49:15 PM PST by Kaslin
From at least the time of the 1980’s, the Republican Party and the “conservative movement” have been dominated by, not conservatives, but neoconservatives. The so-called “libertarian” influence in the party is growing—and neoconservatives are none too pleased by it.
Libertarians, neoconservatives assert, are “isolationists,” “naïve,” even sophomoric, idealists whose detachment from reality borders on being “unpatriotic,” for libertarians threaten to compromise national security, making citizen and soldier alike unsafe.
After all, when his own country is in the midst of a protracted, bloody war, a person who uses his considerable influence to convince large numbers of Americans that their country is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” must surely be deemed a threat of a sort to national security.
A person who cautions people against being fooled into thinking that “God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world,” who claims to “hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant!’” and promising to “break the backbone of your power,” must be an “isolationist,” an opponent of “American Exceptionalism.”
How can libertarians not be said to weaken America’s resolve during times of war, how can they not be said to, in effect, provide “aid and comfort” to the enemy, when they use their public platform to decry the war as “unjust, evil, and futile,” a “demonic, destructive suction tube” and “enemy of the poor?” Do not libertarians exhibit, at best, an astonishing degree of naivety, and, at worst, something bordering on anti-Americanism, when they accuse America of being self-delusional, of indulging “rationalizations” and embarking on an “incessant search for scapegoats” that “blind” her to her own “sins”?
David Frum, writing for National Review, must’ve been on to something when he accused those on the right that opposed the Iraq War of being “unpatriotic.” After all, can an American who refers to the enemy in terms of “the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,” and who claims to speak for the “little brown…children” who now “languish under our bombs” be anything but unpatriotic?
No one who charges America at any time, but particularly when she is at war, with suffering from a “deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for years” and that has actually “sought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord,” can be good for either the Republican Party or, more importantly, national security.
No one who says of the children of America’s enemy that they have been “degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food,” or, in order to survive, they’ve had to busy themselves with “selling their sisters” and “soliciting for their mothers” to our soldiers can ever be thought to support the troops. No one who describes the “business” of our troops as “burning human beings” and “of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane,” can possibly be said to be supporting them, right?
Now for the punch line: None of the foregoing quotations from high profile libertarians are actually from any libertarian. They derive, rather, from a single speech—“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”—delivered on April 30, 1967, from none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.
Was King an “isolationist,” naïve, unpatriotic, and unconscionably nonchalant regarding matters of national security? Was he the “traitor” that neoconservatives accuse Edward Snowden of being? Did he provide “aid and comfort” to America’s enemies?
Maybe he was or wasn’t any of these things. The point, though, is that consistency demands of neoconservatives that they answer these questions in the affirmative, for not only did King use his tremendous influence on the world scene—an influence not a fraction of which any libertarian today can claim to have—to call for an end to the Vietnam War; this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize made the harshest of charges, certainly harsher than any that Ron Paul ever would’ve considered making, against his own country.
Yet this MLK Day, like every other, neoconservatives on talk radio, Fox News, and beyond lavished unadulterated praise upon this man of the hard left, a man, mind you, who was upset, not that America was expending astronomical resources in Vietnam, but that it wasn’t spending these resources waging “war” on poverty at home.
Meanwhile, libertarians who, rightly or wrongly, really do stand for the “limited government” that neoconservatives claim to prize as well, continue to arouse the ire of the latter.
It is time for those of us in “the conservative movement” to take seriously the identity issues of our party.
I’m not a Republican, thank goodness.
Libertopians are Satan spawn
You don’t believe the government should be limited?
Duh. That has always been a argument for Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Why waste and spend our blood and treasure.
Just because I don’t think should have drugs and be sex objects I am pro-tyranny
Perverts always say that
Libertarians are not for limited government, they are for maximum perversions
Only a bed wetting Communist would refer or infer to a Globalist as a Patriot.
Isolationism is a main bastion of Patriotism. Being subservient to the UN, WTO, NAFTA, and foreign entities is un patriotic
If the current America Hating RINOs were in charge of the Declaration of Independence....they would be surrendering to the British
I’m not a Republican either, thank goodness. I come down on the side of Independent Conservatism, Tea Party conservative at that. The Republicans went south on me many years ago and I finally had my fill of them and their self-defeatist reasoning and left them in'96. I voted Republican since 1968 but no more.
I hate to tell you but the Libertarian Party is becoming dominated by their own Progressive Libertarians......... they’re not interested in limited government they are interested in using government to manipulate people into what they believe is progress
You don’t believe the government should be limited?
**********
Government should be limited, but not to the extent of trashing enforcement of sound criminal law and our military.
Granted, there’s room for debate over (1) whether we should criminalize as many actions as we do and (2) the nature and extent of our military intervention.
But libertarians too often presume that if we leave the bad guys alone, they will leave us alone, and that we can hide behind our naval power as we did before intercontinental missles. This doesn’t work with neighborhood thugs, and it won’t work with Moslem and communist thugs abroad. Their worldview also leads them to believe that America can go it entirely alone without the help of allies. The neocons can legitimately wonder Would Ron Paul wait until terrorists were firing missles at us from Canada before he would want to intervene.
Limited government? I have a few problems with the libertarian definition of limited government. Government forcing abortionism (ie, reducing the value of human life to zero) on the people is not conservatism and is certainly not limited government. Government forcing homosexualism on the people against their will is not conservatism nor is it limited government. Government purging God from our society and public institutions is not conservatism nor is it limited government. God is the Creator and the source of life and Liberty.
Isolationism? Failing to realize that whether or not we are at war with global Islamofascism does not mean it is not at war with us and will ultimately destroy us if we do not defend ourselves.
Failure to defend ourselves and our once free society from godless liberalism/progressivism, ie, Marxism will also destroy us. Pretending it’ll all just go away is nonsense.
Pretending that godless Liberaltarianism is the answer is nonsense. Our nation was forged and founded by a godly people and our constitution and system of justice and limited government is based on Judeo-Christian principles. It does not and will not work for a godless society.
Libertarians ignore the root cause that leads to big government socialism and the loss of freedom—the rush to remove all traces of God from our government and public institutions. Our liberty is a gift from God, not government. Without God, we have no foundation, no unalienable rights, no liberty.
The godless government wants to reduce man to the status of a soulless animal. Why? So they can herd us, work us and slaughter us at will. Look at world events of the last 100 years if you do not believe me.
Governments can try, but they can never succeed in killing God. He is even making a comeback in Mother Russia after a century of attempts to oppress the people and wipe Him out.
God lives on in our hearts. Long live Liberty!!
bttt
"The virtue of Libertarianism is its amazing diversity. Only Libertarianism can combine the homosexual motorcycle gang with family men and Libertarians for leather. Not to mention the acid dropper interested in the price of silver."
statement of famed Libertarian, Walter Block.
He wrote a book called "Defending the Undefendable" in which pimps and drug pushers (among others) are really hereoes.
wow.
It really is that wacko
Incidentally, Martin Luther King, Jr., was a plagiarist, fellow traveler, and sexually immoral (among other things). Maybe J. Edgar Hoover was onto something when he said that King was a notorious liar.
The so-called “libertarian” influence in the party is growing—and neoconservatives are none too pleased by it.
__________________________________________
OK, when an article starts out with a bullshit lie; I know the rest is sure to be more of ths SOS.
This is a puff piece designed to shore up a losertarian POV. Just a few hours ealier there was some lib article postd here which went on to show how the congressional Liberty Caucus has fallen apart. Especially since head lib L. Ron Paul has left the building.
Libertarians. (hoccc puti)
See tagline.
“But libertarians too often presume that if we leave the bad guys alone, they will leave us alone, and that we can hide behind our naval power as we did before intercontinental missles.”
Maybe some believe that. I only speak for myself, when I say that the bad guys should be severely punished, if they commit a crime of violence or theft. If they commit an act of war, total war should be made against them, not these politically correct wars that last forever and accomplish nothing. If they don’t love us, they should fear us.
“But libertarians too often presume that if we leave the bad guys alone, they will leave us alone, and that we can hide behind our naval power as we did before intercontinental missles.”
Maybe some believe that. I only speak for myself, when I say that the bad guys should be severely punished, if they commit a crime of violence or theft. If they commit an act of war, total war should be made against them, not these politically correct wars that last forever and accomplish nothing. If they don’t love us, they should fear us.
*************
But what if the thugs try to nibble away at us bit by bit, not committing any overt “act of war” directly against us, but invading our allies one by one until we stand alone? This has already happened in many a neighborhood, until the last remaining good guy is forced to leave. A hero named “George Zimmerman” tried to stop it in his own neighborhood but got blamed by a lot of the libertarian contingent here at FR — until the case in his favor got so obvious that even they had to keep quiet. What happens in our neighborhoods is mirrored in international relations.
Because Jim NAILS the immoral ideals of libertarians. They get mighty tiresome as they claim to be for individual liberty and claim to be strict Constitutionalists, yet they ignore the moral values.
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Forgot your Geritol again didn’t you...
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