UPDATED: Rand Paul: Action Hero, Or Political Performance Artist?

Ethics, Labor, libertarianism, Morality, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Ron Paul, Taxation

“Rand Paul: Action Hero, Or Political Performance Artist?” is the current column, now on WND. Here’s an excerpt:

“Rand Paul is front-and-center in mainstream media, showing what some call ‘leadership.’ Not a week goes by when the son of Ron Paul—the legendary libertarian legislator from Texas—is not introducing one Act or another, ostensibly to lighten the incubus of government.

This week it’s the REINS Act (‘Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2013’). Last week it was the ‘Sequester Alternative Plan.’

I like the Senator from Kentucky’s energy. The question is: Is this political Brownian motion—the case of activity substituting for achievement—or real Randian energy in furtherance of liberty? …

… Rand Paul’s latest political song and dance saw the senator return $600,000 in savings, accrued in the course of running a cost-efficient office, to the US Treasury, where it does not belong.

The savings belong to taxpayers. Stolen goods stuffed down the maw of the federal beast will disappear without trace. For all we know, and given the fact of fungibility, these savings could be diverted into the domestic drone program.

Yes, Sen. Paul followed legal protocol in returning taxpayer property to the Treasury. However, the positive man-made law is not a libertarian loadstar. From the son of Ron more is expected.

But should this be the case? Perhaps Rand Paul deserves a break.

All too familiar is the libertarian type that has nothing to say about policy and politics for fear of compromising theoretical purity. Suspended as he is in the arid arena of pure thought, this specimen has opted to live in perpetual sin: the sin of abstraction.

The ‘ideal of liberty,’ philosopher-pundit Jack Kerwick has urged, must be ‘brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.’

But should the command to lead an earthbound existence push us into political compromises? …”

The complete column is “Rand Paul: Action Hero, Or Political Performance Artist?” Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE (Marc 1): “On the heels of Barack Obama’s Las Vegas run-on ramble on the necessity of immigration ‘reform,’ this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced that he too had ‘evolved’ overnight on the issue. “I’m … open-minded enough to say that it is an issue that we do need to evolve on,” the senator vaporized.”

The Republicans found religion on immigration, and so did Rand Paul “evolve” along with them.

CPAC Blackballs The Doughball

Conservatism, John McCain, Politics, Race, Republicans

Conspicuous by his absence from this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference will be Chris Christie. New Jersey’s popular Republican governor is getting his comeuppance. He campaigned for the Democrat Barack Obama throughout October of 2012. Now the governor has not been invited to partake at CPAC. “He’s not … conservative,” offered Al Cardenas, who is chairman of the American Conservative Union that sponsors CPAC.

CPAC has hosted many unconservative members of the regime, McMussolini, for example.

• As part of the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity, McCain worked to legalize 20 million deadwood illegal immigrants.
• He blessed Bush’s deficit spending and obscene stimulus package.
• By National Review’s count, McCain voted for higher taxes 50 time.
• He disparaged Mitt Romney for making it in the private sector.

On and on.

The Conservative Political Action Conference would be acting slightly less incongruously were they to blackball Christie for being the consummate backstabbing, slimy, opportunistic politician. Republicans who are not conservative are the norm—and certainly more common than the GOP’s Arlen Specters.

Meanwhile, CPAC and the Republicans have commenced a “slobbering love affair” with Ben Carson.

Derek Turner’s ‘Sea Changes’

Britain, English, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Literature

“Well-written, meticulously researched and thought-out, Sea Changes, Derek Turner’s first novel, succeeds mightily in bringing to life the prototypical players in the Western tragedy that is mass migration. The reader becomes intimately au fait with the many, oft-unwitting actors in this doomed stand-off: small-town conservative folks vs. progressive city slickers; salt-of-the-earth countrymen against smug, self-satisfied left-liberals. Ever present are the ruthless traffickers in human misery: both media and smugglers. Like it or not, the dice are loaded. In this epic battle, the scrappy scofflaws and their stakeholders triumph; the locals lose.”—ILANA MERCER, Author, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, Columnist, WND & RT

I don’t read novels, other than Anita Brookner’s achingly beautiful studies in solitude. Brookner is brilliant. (And no, there is not a feminist bone in her body; she writes about the impact of a vanishing Britain on the already lonely individual.) When Vladimir Nabokov, Patrick White and Isaac Bashevis Singer stopped writing—on account of shuffling off this mortal coil—I stopped reading novels. Almost everything written by today’s writers is stream-of-consciousness nonsense. (A careful guardian of the English language Tom Wolfe is not.)

If time allows, I may explore V.S. Naipaul; I like the way his mind works. But so long as Toynbee’s A Study of History (abridged) and Murray’s Human Accomplishment lie on my bed unfinished (and so many others languish in my library unread), Naipaul will have to wait.

Nevertheless, I not only read Derek Turner’s Sea Changes, I provided advance praise for the book. It’s that good. Read it.

President Pain

Barack Obama, Constitution, Ethics, Government, IMMIGRATION

It is “almost an impeachable offense for Obama to make specific spending cuts to hurt us,” contended Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox And Friends.

“The key word is PAIN. If the president is deciding how to spend money in order to hurt us,” said Judge Napolitano, “rather than in order to provide us with the services for which we have paid, and for which we have hired him—he is doing the opposite of what he has taken an oath to do.”

He has taken an oath faithfully to uphold the laws. In other words, to make the government work; don’t make it painful. Find a way to make it work on 2 percent less. He has, absolute, leeway as the chief executive. Leeway is integral to his office. As the head of the Executive Branch, the president can prioritize money and cuts. … Instead, he wants to cut in away that’ll make us stand inline five hours at the airport, and teach the Republicans a lesson. That’s the way the Constitution [should] work.

(VIA Myron Pauli.) The president’s first priority in causing you pain, just so you know who’s boss—he and family, after all, have a security detail for life—is to spring criminal aliens from jail.

Not only is this president an ass with ears, but he is also pain in the ass.