Every ‘winger-driven faux story now has two phases. First headline: “Faux story!” Second: “Faux story becomes huge story!” Pathetic.
This is actually a bit truncated. The steps are:
Faux Story
Why is the Em-Ess-Em ignoring this huge Faux Story?
After days or weeks of flood-the-zone coverage across multiple conservative media outlets, some significant portion of the base is convinced that the faux story is true and/or significant.
Mainstream press takes note of (3) and speculates about the political and electoral consequences
Panicked Democrats react as though the faux story is true and/or significant
I seem to have been a busy little bee this past week, so for those of you who aren’t following me on Twitter, here’s what I’ve gotten up to instead of, you know, blogging here:
In an essay for Newsweek, I argue that Barack Obama should withdraw his threat to veto added GAO oversight of the intelligence community.
In a piece for The American Prospect, I argue why a proposed change to the FBI’s authority to issue National Security Letters for Internet transactional data ought to be extremely worrying.
If you’re tired of reading for the week—and I don’t blame you—I discuss both of those things in a new Cato Daily Podcast.
Finally, I’ve got an article in the new print issue of National Review (on newsstands now!) arguing that conservatives ought to regard the sprawling intelligence sector with the same skeptical eye they would any other arm of Big Government.
I already linked the C-Span stream of my panel on digital privacy and the urgent need for reforms to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, but for those who missed it the first time, here’s a Cato YouTube clip of my portion for your viewing pleasure:
So, I’m not only struck by how profoundly screwed up Jonah Goldberg’s reaction to the recently released audiotapes of Mel Gibson threatening his ex seems—I’m astonished that, having had these thoughts pass through his head, he’s oblivious enough to this that he’d publish them:
I think Gibson is clearly troubled and despite his well-documented paranoia, there are many long knives out with his name on them. I think it is grotesque for his wife to release tapes like this (assuming she is the culprit). [...]
My point isn’t to say he’s no conservative because he’s so clearly troubled. Conservatives are, like all other kinds of humans, perfectly capable of mental breakdowns and other tragic maladies. I guess what I object to is the idea that somehow anyone should treat this situation differently because of the man’s political allegiances, real or alleged. This is a sad situation made all the sadder because there’s such a huge market for it.
Can we review? The manifestation of Mel Gibson’s “tragic malady” in this instance is that he repeatedly roared threats to kill his estranged ex and burn down her house. And these aren’t exactly idle threats, because in what I can only assume was a terrifying exchange, he alludes to having earlier hit her hard enough to break several of her teeth—something he claims she “deserved.” I suppose it’s accurate, in a sense, to say he’s “troubled”—there’s obviously something very badly wrong with the guy—though also unusually fortunate in that he’d have ample resources to discreetly seek counseling.
But this is, shall we say, not the usual emphasis of conservatives when discussing people who commit violent crimes. Some unemployable inner city junkie who resorts to theft can expect a lecture on personal responsibility—not sympathy for how “unseemly” it is for his crime to be publicly exposed. But a multi-millionaire who beats up women and then threatens murder? He sounds an awful lot like a Victim of Society in Goldberg’s account.
It seems like the debate over where libertarians should make their political home is evergreen, even though I’ve always thought the answer was the rather boringly obvious one: Libertarian individuals and institutions should make whatever tactical alliances on specific issues that best suit their dispositions and concerns. Still, a couple points about Ilya Somin’s response to the Reason debate linked above:
[Brink] Lindsey seems to have stepped back from his much-discussed 2006 argument for a “liberaltarian” coalition between libertarians and liberals.
I realize the original “Liberaltarian” essay does read as a proposal for a near-term political alliance, but I always took the real point to be more about opening a somewhat longer-term dialogue to see what we can learn from each other given the substantial overlap in our higher-order value commitments. That, at least, I’ve found reasonably fruitful.
To the extent that this hasn’t resulted in “an equivalent level” of cooperation with the left as that with the right on economic policy, it may be because few liberals have been willing to reciprocate. It’s striking that Lindsey’s own highly publicized efforts at forging liberaltarian cooperation met with little or no positive response among liberals.
This actually seems wrong to me. Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be much interest on the left in any kind of broad self-conscious “Liberaltarian Alliance”—but practical political coalitions don’t actually spring from New Republic essays, any more than real-world friendships arise from a formal declaration of an intent to be friends.. They’re a function of actually getting out there and doing the work, issue by issue, bill by bill, election by election. Given my own pattern of interests, I end up mostly working on issues where I agree with civil libertarians on the left. And pretty much without exception, they’re happy to work with me on those issues, and for that limited purpose indifferent to whatever disagreements we might have over optimal levels of federal taxation and spending. None of the folks I’ve written for at the Prospect or the Nation have ever expressed the least reservation about running something with a Cato byline. If anything, I think left-leaning civil libertarians are happy to be able to point to us as evidence that opposition to torture or sweeping surveillance authority isn’t some strictly partisan punch up between Democrats and Republicans. There are, to be sure, advantages to broader alliances, but one benefit to keeping both parties (and their associated movements) at arms-length is that I think (or would like to think) that it’s hard to credibly argue I’m going to take a position or write an op-ed on one of my core issues with the primary motive of rooting for or against one team or another. Membership has its privileges, but so does a measure of distance.
Update: In light of Ilya Somin’s response, I realize I’ve muddled together two distinct points here. The first is that I don’t think libertarians—and certainly not the libertarian movement as a whole—need to decide to “throw in” with one side or another in some kind of general coalition, whether traditionally fusionist or “liberaltarian.” That said, if there were going to be some kind of broader “liberaltarian” alliance or collaboration, my point is that while it would obviously entail more than the kind of ad hoc, issue-based collaboration I’m suggesting is enough, that’s how in practice it would have to start anyway. So even if you thought a “liberaltarian alliance” were ultimately the way to go, you’d still begin with more limited collaboration and go from there.
