Category Archives: Constitution

UPDATED: CPUKE 2015 (Ann Coulter Joins Libertarians, Gets Off Warpath)

Conservatism, Constitution, Foreign Policy, libertarianism, Military, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Regulation, Republicans

Well, well, like the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, CPUKE 2015 is lighter on the bimbo factor of yesteryear—CPUKE usually showcases retards like S. E. Cupp and assorted twits—but heavier with the weight of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) are as close as it gets to constitutional conservatism. When quizzed by Fox News’ Sean Hannity about their positions on The Issues, both left drugs and marriage to the states. It would appear that the two are the only candidates standing for the Republican Party who reject centralized federal control over drugs and marriage. Libertarians want the state, local and national, out of marriage and drug use—the last must be legalized. So while the Cruz/Paul position is a compromise, it’s better than the rest. Cruz is far more intelligent and personable than Paul, so observing his intellectual virtuosity is more enjoyable.

Building up the largest military in the world, ours, it the focus of the megalomaniacal Donald Trump, who needs to go away for once and for all. “The business mogul is motivated by the sense that the nimbus of great power that surrounds the US is dissipating. It hasn’t occurred to him to search closer to home for the causes of America’s economic anemia—at Fanny, Freddie, and the Fed, for a start. Since Trump has no idea what’s potting, and is not eager to look in his own plate — he blames OPEC, China and Mexico for the burdens of doing business in the US.” More from “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense”:

The Trump plan to reclaim global greatness and glory includes a strategy America has yet to try: the use of force, of course. Strutting around on the world stage, showing those Russians, Saudis, Chinese amd Mexicans who is boss: this may serve as a perfect panacea for the deficiencies in Trump’s persona, but is hardly a solution to US woes, at home or abroad.

Sadly, most other Republicans will echo these themes and the mob will cheer them. The WSJ summed up the overall lukewarm reaction to a libertarian foreign policy:

Many among [Paul followers] seemed receptive to his more restrained view of the use of military might, but the audience throughout the conference has responded enthusiastically to hawkish messages from the podium. Some of the best-received applause lines throughout the conference have been bellicose language and criticism of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.

Mr. Paul linked his call for foreign policy limits to the kind of anti-government rhetoric that is popular with conservatives.

“We should not succumb to the notion that a government inept at home will somehow become successful abroad, that a government that is unable to deliver the mail will somehow be able to build nations’ abroad,” he said.

Later.

UPDATE I (2/28): It doesn’t take much to obliterate the lessons of history and political philosophy. CPUKE followers are on the warpath. From the Facebook thread:

Craig Smith: Many things to comment on here, and variously agree/disagree with. That event could have been much better orchestrated. But your comments which belittle the clamor for a militarily-revitalized are puzzling, especially against the backdrop of both an ever-increasingly dangerous world and Obama’s gutting, emasculating, and purging of the American military. I know that you are aware of all of this as well as anyone. I don’t have exactly the same opinion of all the parties that you criticize here. But I am wondering if you blurred the distinction of criticizing these individuals as individuals with the policy or policies they advocate.
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Ilana Mercer: Come again, Craig Smith!!!! I was under the impression you were aware that this was a libertarian Timeline of a libertarian writer. You appear to have strong, simmering neoconservative leanings. Time to start reading the good stuff again, Craig Smith…See More
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Craig Smith: I never forget that you are a strict libertarian. I like the novelty, but not all strict libertarianism seems viable to me. Nor, in the context even of all your works, does all of it always seem internally consistent. In any case, I urge an inventory-taking on what I brought up above.

Ilana Mercer: Craig Smith, you urge that I change on the basis of nothing but your drinking of the CPUKE Kool-Aid. I urge that you do the reading over the next few days of stuff that is as predictive as it was when first written. Why must I change when all I have predicted has panned out? All my predictions and analyses since 2002 have stood the test of time, so why must I change my philosophy? Here’s a better idea: do the reading. In “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (2004) I give some analogies to the advice of the pundits you urge me to follow. Some good lines.

UPDATE II: Ann Coulter Joins Libertarians, Gets Off Warpath. Doff of the hat to Kerry Crowel for the alert. He writes:

Have you read Ann Coulter’s latest column? … I think she’s been reading from the Mercer backlog. Especially the bit about “politicians obsessed with cleaning up the rest of the world.”

Huckabee, ‘Forrest Gump’ Of The GOP

Conservatism, Constitution, Elections, Neoconservatism, Republicans

A “confidence trickster worthy of a P.T. Barnum circus” was how this column captured Mike Huckabee’s appeal. It must be conceded that Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review captures even better the forced and contrived, “cornpone” appeal of the man who will be vying to stand as the Republican’s nominee for the presidency. While I reject the writer’s crass, almost bereft of principle pragmatism; and although unable to tell whether Cooke prefers Mark Levin’s worldview to that of Calvin Coolidge—perhaps our only libertarian president—I liked his depiction of The Huckster:

Among the panoply of rightward-leaning politicians who are currently flirting with running for the presidency is one Mike Huckabee, a former pastor, governor, television host, and author who has of late been preparing for office by converting himself into Larry the Cable Guy. Huckabee is touring the breadth and width of the country in support of his new book — the alliteratively titled God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy — the purpose of which seems to be to establish its author as the unparalleled down-home candidate within the 2016 primary. Unlike so many in Washington, Huckabee claims, he is firmly on the side of “Bubbaville” rather than “Bubbleville”; of the “catfish and cornbread crowd” rather than “the crepes and caviar set”; and of those who “come home tired at the end of the day” rather than those who “burn tires in the street.” Are you tired of the incumbent set? he seems to ask. Then you know what to do.

By taking this approach, Huckabee is essentially attempting to become to the Right what the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson have become to the Left: namely, a proxy figure who can be used as shorthand by the lazy and the lost to signify their allegiance to a set of cherished cultural values. “We like the simple life,” Huckabee announces in his book. “Status is a Ford 150 truck; luxury is crawfish étouffée and slaw on your pulled-pork sandwich; and privilege is front-row seats at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.” And unlike those “misfortunate” souls in “Manhattan, the Washington Beltway, or in Beverly Hills,” we know the joy that one can get from wading “in chest-deep water to hunt mallards.” Insofar as it goes, there is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, I like many of these things too. But the self-conscious spinning of local tradition into a national political aesthetic is invariably irritating, and, typically, electorally counterproductive. There are many wonderful things about the world Huckabee is attempting to represent. But surely, just surely, it is possible for a southerner to run for high office without dressing up as Forrest Gump? …

… Whatever cultural renaissance Mike Huckabee might believe is necessary in the United States, it will be up to civil society and not to the political classes to bring it about. Unless conservatives wish to join the Left in its Wilsonian quest to glue politics to absolutely everything, our would-be emissaries really need to make up their minds …

MORE.

South-African Zealot Helen Zille, A Disgrace To Liberalism In The Classical Tradition

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Free Speech, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, South-Africa

For the infinitesimally small incidents of white-on-black crimes of violence in South Africa, “Helen Zille, the left-liberal leader of [South Africa’s] ‘official opposition’ in parliament,” dares to blame courageous individuals like Dan Roodt. For he has deigned to stand up for the rights of Afrikaners, and has spoken out tirelessly on behalf of Afrikaner history, culture and self-determination. (More about Afrikaner history in Into The Cannibal’s Pot.)

For that, zealot Helen Zille has saddled Roodt with the responsibility for crimes he has never advocated nor committed. Moreover, this ignorant female dared to depict Dan, a highly educated former leftist, as an ignoramus:

Gone are the khaki-clad, gun-toting, horse-riding para-militaries of old. They have now been replaced by one pop star and one self-proclaimed intellectual, in Steve Hofmeyr and Dan Roodt. I often wonder what happened in Steve Hofmeyr’s life to turn him into the man he has become. It was not always so. And few people know that Dan Roodt went into self imposed exile rather than serve in the SA Defence Force during apartheid. What happened?
Both these men are outspokenly offensive on issues of race, Hofmeyr through his concerts and Roodt through his website and twitter. Their strategy is to be as racially provocative as possible, under the guise of language and cultural freedom. Nothing particularly unique about that approach. But they then cry foul when people respond. Social media is a tough space and they should stay off the playground if they can’t take the punches they dish out.
Cloaked in flowery prose and intellectual bluster, their racism has emboldened some of their followers. I doubt it is a coincidence that the increase in racist incidents across the country has run parallel to the increase in their public profiles.

This woman is a disgrace to liberalism in the classical tradition (libertarianism). Scrap that. Zille is a plain disgrace. And stupid to boot.

Dan distills the mindset of the likes of Zille The Zealot:

When a blacks torture or hurt whites, even a baby as was recently reported by the Beeld newspaper, whites are to blame. That is the gist of Zille’s and cultural-Marxist discourse in South Africa. And if you question that dogma, as some of us are wont to do, you are an ogre, a racist, an “apartheid denialist” in the language of Webber Wentzel’s band of legal inquisitors.

What Zille understands under “challenge” is a euphemism for vilification, censorship and persecution. If you deviate from the cultural-Marxist canon of South African history, you will be fined, imprisoned or both. That is what is being planned for us and Zille’s “liberal” DA – which has of course as little to do with classical liberalism as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had to do with democracy – will support these draconian measures to suppress our free speech.

No doubt, this crushingly stupid cow would describe my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, in the same vain, although she would be hard-pressed to offer textual proof for her demonstrable falsehoods.

Stalinist speech laws, and Kangaroo courts like the one before which Dan will be hauled, are instantiated in that obese and obscene document the South Africans call a Constitution—these Sovietized laws preclude my visiting the country of my birth. The Cannibal is used by immigration lawyers to help white refugees remain in the West—the La Raza has lobbyist like the Democratic Party and the Demopublican US presidents. Whites don’t!

If not the usual ANC cognoscenti, you just know that some South African Jewish quorum will pitch up to protest the presence of the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot in the country of her birth, South Africa.

‘Cromnibus’ And Other Unrepublican (Small ‘r’) Crappiness

Conservatism, Constitution, Debt, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, The Courts

Nothing much at all remains of the original, American constitutional scheme, which was supposed to respect process above all, but is now result-oriented. Andrew McCarthy examines “last week’s “cromnibus” debacle” as well as the decision, Tuesday, of “a federal court in Pittsburgh—it “ruled that Obama’s amnesty decree is unconstitutional”—only to conclude that,

Imperious judicial activism is no better than imperious executive overreach. That the result the judge reaches happens to accord with conservative sentiments does not make the exercise any less invalid. After all, what offends conservatives about President Obama’s machinations is his disregard for the Constitution’s limits on his authority. Judge Schwab, analogously, has run roughshod over constitutional boundaries that limit the exercise of judicial authority. The Constitution empowers judges to resolve only cases and controversies that are actually before the court. In this case, President Obama’s decree was not before Judge Schwab — at least until he gratuitously directed the parties, who had not raised it, to address it.

These two cases are simply standard operating procedure for a Congress and a judiciary engaged in habitual, unpardonable transgressions. McCarthy’s is a good analysis, however, he should not be scandalized about business as usual in America’s highly centralized, politicized, mobocracy.

MORE McCarthy.