Can a Christian be a libertarian? A column with some questionable logic that prevents the piece from being truly thought-provoking. A few things:

Libertarians talk a lot about economics, and rightfully so. Money is central to a healthy economy. Christians are also concerned about money; in fact God talks frequently about money in the Bible.

Actually, money is mentioned more in the Bible than anything else. I’ve written previously of this here. Scriptures tell us that money is a tool with which evil can control man. The Bible obviously doesn’t give political doctrine specific to the Fed, but rather as Christians we are taught to use our access to money as a way of evangelism through deed. This is something libertarianism leaves out, the God part. Are libertarians conservatives without God? That’s a question friends and I have discussed.

It is truly unfortunate that modern American churches seem to think the state’s means of “spreading democracy” through aggressive war is more important than spreading the peaceful message of the Gospel of Christ. Jesus came to bring “peace on earth, good will to men,” and by extension the Christian’s goal ought to be the same.

This passage presupposes that every conflict in which the United States has ever engaged is due to the United States’s frat boy aggression and need to sow its seed of democracy by force. Furthermore, it’s odd to me that a follower of limited government would advocate for a state-endorsed religion as a way of nation building, supplanting the previous logical fallacy. This author quotes Paul more than the Bible, which tells me everything I need to know about this piece. Ron Paul is not God. What is truly unfortunate is that by making the universal straw man that “modern American churches seem to think,” i.e. all churches, the author betrays a (conscious or subconscious) prejudice against churches based on his own presupposition.

Horn misses a huge part of Christ’s work, exemplified in Matthew 10:34:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

I get that Horn wants to promote his stylized version of Biblical interpretation, but he should realize that Ron Paul’s words carry no weight compared to Christ’s, and he perhaps should study the Word of God more than Paul’s words, especially those newsletters.

(more…)

I’ve been saying this for months: appeal to the egos of any coalition and exploit the cracks. People always choose self-preservation over the greater good, most of the time, with the belief that self-preservation is the greater good.

Newsweek provides yet another piece on this topic, one of a long succession of MSM articles breathlessly seal-clapping in anticipation of the catalyst which accomplishes this.

Blah blah blah – it was this that prompted me to write:

“Most evangelical Christian conservatives I know would at least be uneasy about the prospect of the government leaving the poor to their own devices and having churches pick up the slack,” he says.

Wrong. Heinously, irresponsibly, embarrassingly wrong. This from Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. His sound bites are all about stoking libertarians to feel like disenfranchised underdogs with the goal of rousing them to lash out at the big bully Christian conservatives.

What’s wrong with his statement above? Aside from this giant “rift” to which he alludes and desires? Most evangelical Christian conservatives I know would at least be uneasy about the prospect of the government picking up the slack of caring for the poor due to Christians’ abdication of their role in society as dictated by Scripture.

(more…)

So Jason Levin is the total moron who put together the “Crash the Tea Party” web site. Levin is not your garden variety moron though. I mean it takes a pretty impressive level of idiocy to attempt to covertly infiltrate the biggest and most widely covered political movement in the country at the moment using a publicly available web site to provide details and solicit support for your plan. This idea is so completely idiotic that when I first heard about it I figured Levin would turn out to be an internet marketer and that this was really just a PR ploy. But alas, it seems he really is just stupid.

However, since Levin is now getting some media coverage for his little scheme – from the AP and TPM among others – I decided to dig around a bit and see if I could add anything interesting to the public record on Mr. Levin. (Not surprisingly, Free Republic was the first to expose Levin’s real identity and has dug up a lot of other useful information about him.)

What I managed to find is Levin’s personal blog on Blogger, which unfortunately (if not surprisingly) seems to have been recently blocked from public view. Equally regrettable, the site is also excluded from Google’s web caching feature so it is impossible to view any full pages on his site.

However, by using the partial text results from this Google search, along with a Digg post, and some guesswork on key words, I’ve been able to uncover the gist of a blog post of Levin’s from May 2008 entitled “My Personal Political Manifesto”. It’s organized into ten statements of belief. Here are the partial segments I was able to uncover: (more…)

As you may know, I do a cartoon on Big Hollywood every Sunday with Batton Lash called Obama Nation. It gives us the opportunity to lampoon the WPE* since few others seemed willing to do it when we started. But Big Journalism offers the opportunity to mock the “mainstream media” which constantly fails to report the facts or deal with reality. So I called up another friend, comics veteran and fellow libertarian, Val Mayerik to enter the fray and have a few laughs.

The strip we’re doing is called “Useful Idiots.” A term coined by the Soviets as the pet name they had for Western Lefties who believed any lie they were fed. It will feature a cast of familiar characters you may have seen on TV while changing channels. For the sake of storytelling we’ve put them all at the same network which we call BSN. And we focus on showing how the so called infotainment world provides neither. Info nor entertainment. Just a lot of partisan noise dressed up as “news” or “commentary”.

(more…)

Two years ago today, William F. Buckley moved on to the great Firing Line in the Sky where he is, no doubt, still debating the wisdom of turning over the Panama Canal with the Gipper. Buckley’s legacy lives on, not only in the remarkable generation of writers that he spawned after he first dared to stand athwart history and yell stop but, in an odd sort of way, in the manner in which some of the liberals he defied over the course of five decades seem to pine for the great man’s genteel ways.

On a personal note, Buckley was one of the two great influences in the creative life of this particular – not particularly humble – correspondent. The other was that irascible Chicago newspaperman/Everyman: Mike Royko. It’s difficult to imagine an odder couple, but Buckley and Royko shared at least a couple of common characteristics. One took them on at one’s peril (and very few ever successfully did so) and neither could be neatly constrained within an ideological box. Royko was classically liberal, but he openly scorned the liberal elite. Buckley became the symbol of the conservative movement, but he refused to let the movement define him, cutting his own path through the ideological jungle when necessary, most famously when he argued for the legalization of many illegal drugs. Agree or disagree, both Royko and Buckley were thinkers, and honest thinkers to boot, who had a knack for expressing their thoughts with the kind of panache that left their readers breathless in awe. (more…)

In the wake of yesterday’s tragedy in Austin, it’s certainly worthwhile to ask what caused troubled software engineer Joe Stack to crash a plane into an office building that housed 200 Internal Revenue Service employees. But will the media get the story right? Perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll be blessedly wrong about this, but I don’t think so.

We know how these stories seem to go. The “unbiased” journalists from the old media working in the field first develop the story, establish the “factual record” and – once that job is done – the would-be opinion makers move on, using that “factual” docket to make their pious cases. The narrative has begun, as this AP story demonstrates. Joe Stack hated the IRS, felt that this oft-criticized agency had done him wrong and – the conclusion is easy to see – was therefore another right-wing nut job who went over the edge. He was a victim, if you will, of the hatred and fury that festers within the conservative and libertarian movements. His friends, the AP tells us, never saw it coming:

They never heard Stack talk about politics, about taxes, about the government — the sources of pain that Stack claims drove him to his death.

But, nowhere in this story does the AP drill down any further. If you read Stack’s 3,000+ word on-line suicide note, it’s clear that he didn’t hate the IRS because he despised big-government per se. He hated the IRS because he believed that the agency was in collusion with the ultimate enemy: big business. A few telling examples from Stack’s manifesto: (more…)