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CBS started out in radio.

Best,
WJA

Severin is big. Sen. Bob Hedlund of the Republican Liberty Caucus is a more libertarian-oriented pol who actually holds office. I suppose I could have even mentioned Gene Burns' old show. As for Weld, he did show some inkling of his self-professed libertarianism in his first two years in office - he actually cut the state budget by spending less than the previous year, he supported privatization and tax cuts, and initially he even opposed most gun control. But it all went downhill from there and picked up speed after he was reelected.

Thanks,

W. James Antle III

I am actually in total agreement with you. I am not saying that the pro-life movement's shift to an incremental strategy was a bad thing - I have in fact written in support of it. My only point was that Kucinich is using the fact that a good deal of recent pro-life legislation could be supported by people who favor keeping abortion legal - but subject to some restrictions and without public funding - to claim that he has not changed his position on the issue.

My argument in the piece is that he had an opportunity in 1998 to highlight his differences with pro-lifers on abortion and he failed to do so. Instead, he competed for pro-life votes and amassed a record adequate to prevent the state's biggest pro-life group from endorsing the right-to-life activist who was challenging him. His current pro-choice stance does in fact amount to a change of position. I was not trying to make the case that the Patrick Henry Men represent the only valid way to advance the right to life. I

I hope that this explanation clarifies things.

Best,

W. James Antle III

Goldwater said in his autobiography that he wanted to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he found two sections unconstitutional. I agree that he did not pander to racists, because he told an audience in South Carolina that he would enforce the the new civil rights law if elected president.

He had voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and had supported the desegregation of Phoenix. He wasn't a segregationist, just a libertarian/constitutionalist.

Overall, the book does show the administration in a positive light. It's a pro-Bush book. But all these guys who come out of the administration to write books like to add some counterintuitive observation and settle old scores with people they didn't get along with.

Hard as it is to imagine now, for center-right Democrats who were frustrated with their national party, Jimmy Carter was considered the last hope. Walter Mondale was a generally anti-communist Cold War liberal, not yet somebody aligned with the New Left. Many "neo-cons" who were still Democrats backed the Carter-Mondale ticket in 1976. It was when they became disgusted with the administration that most of the holdouts flocked to the GOP, supporting Ronald Reagan in 1980.

This is very true. There was not another black Republican in a voting position in the House until Gary Franks won a seat from Connecticut in 1990. Although Edward Brooke was elected to the U.S. Senate by Massachusetts as a Republican in 1966. He served two terms but was defeated by Paul Tsongas in 1978.

I was the token conservative columnist at our student newspaper when I was in college. The politically active campus was, on balance, pretty solidy left-of-center and we College Republicans and other conservatives thought we were living under politically correct oppression. But we actually had it pretty good compared to most other places, including your school. Never once was a column of mine spiked and I was never asked to edit what I believe.

I had only a couple of instances where an editor changed something I wrote. I used to refuse to call Bill Clinton "President Clinton," not because I was in denial but because I just didn't like the looks of it. I used to prefer to call him "Mr. Clinton" when I was being polite. One semester, I got a new editor who didn't like the use of "Mr." or "Ms." in front of people's names, so she changed a couple references from "Mr. Clinton" to "President Clinton." In my next column, I wrote that my policy was never to refer to Bill Clinton as "President Clinton," and if readers saw such as reference in my column it was because it had been changed from "That Bastard" during editing. The editor changed "That Bastard" to "That Bubba."

Or maybe it's just the intellectual equivalent of making an argument for a position without answering every counter-argument. You are too quick to assume bad faith. I won't repeat that mistake next week. You can either address my arguments then or continue to call me names, whichever you prefer.

Best,
W. James Antle III

I'm fully aware of the Sept. 14 resolution. I'll answer this and other objections in my next article, since all these posts plus emails require an article-length response to do them justice. You might disagree with my analysis, which is fine, but that hardly makes me a liar. But feel free to call me one if that makes you feel better.

OK. Have at me.

Best,
W. James Antle III

One thing you might also wish to consider is that Reagan, while not necessarily an "intellectual" himself, was well-versed in the writings of conservative and classical liberal intellectual intellectuals (Kirk, Hayek, Friedman), in addition to the fact that he devoured substantive conservative journalism. But you are correct, by the time he became president he may only have served eight years in elected office but he had over 20 years of serious conservative activism under his belt.

One thing you might also wish to consider is that Reagan, while not necessarily an "intellectual" himself, was well-versed in the writings of conservative and classical liberal intellectual intellectuals (Kirk, Hayek, Friedman), in addition to the fact that he devoured substantive conservative journalism. But you are correct, by the time he became president he may only have served eight years in elected office but he had over 20 years of serious conservative activism under his belt.

Cultural recognition is not an adequate basis for rights. Right either exist as a proper claim or they don't. We may disagree as to the nature of rights - I do believe in God-given rights that each human being intrinsically has - but rights cannot be subject to cultural consensus or majority vote, or they do not exist as rights in any meaningful sense.

The question is not as simple as the manner in which you frame it. The Constitution initially permitted slavery and Dred Scott was decided on the basis that black slaves were not citizens under the Constitution. Based on their humanity, we ultimately rejected that construction and embraced equal rights.

Simply because we have failed to recognize an entity's "personhood" in the past is not an adequate argument for continuing to do so in the future. Part of the American political experience has been its progress toward recognizing all human beings as persons.

I don't think the matter is as simple as visiting the sins of the father upon the child, but I understand your concerns about abortion in cases of rape. Nevertheless, I believe it should be legally permissible. I am going to write a future article about this issue and I will bring it to your attention at that time so you may comment on it. Thanks.

Actually, the author fails to show any such difference between an unjoined and joined egg and sperm, for that matter.

The joining of egg and sperm creates a new, self-contained physical organism. It is this new organism that is a new, genetically distinct human being. It may be true in some cosmic sense that contraception or even abstenience may cause a human being to not come into existence. But an abortion kills a human being that already exists.

The only problem with your analogy is that Democrats and Republicans attempt to differentiate themselves on the basis of liberalism and conservatism, not on the basis of whether they are democrats or republicans. Most Republicans would consider themselves democrats and many Democrats would consider themselves republicans.

For an advocate of individual liberty and limited government to decide that it makes more sense to work within the Republican Party than the Libertarian Party is no different than a person making a decision that one can work more effectively for environmentalism within the Democratic Party than in the Green Party.

I understand what you're saying, but there are several small problems with it. There are Democrats who are definitely small-r Republicans and most Republicans would probably consider themselves small-d democrats, so your analogy breaks down there. Secondly, libertarianism is a political ideology, like liberalism or conservatism (although it is not completely exclusive of those labels - there are left-libertarians and right-libertarians). It is not simply the creed of a political party. The Libertarian Party exists, ostensibly at least, to promote libertarianism, but libertarianism doesn't exist to promote the Libertarian Party. In fact, libertarianism as a body of thought considerably predates the LP. So your analogy is a little bit like saying that a conservative should belong to something called the Conservative Party rather than the Republican Party.

Your apparent belief that government can only become too big and too abusive of individual rights when engaged in functions you disapprove of is untenable, but it is at least debatable. Aside from your insistence that I confidently asserted smaller government would have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks - rather than simply suggested that government was already bureaucratic enough to doubt that adding more layers of bureaucracy was the answer - you did not repeat your obvious misrepresentations of my words from your previous post. This, rather than what I consider to be flaws in your analysis, is all I intended to correct.