Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

Some songs NEVER go out of style.

Well, that was a big waste of everybody’s time.

Not just because the impeachment of Donald Trump is going to be nullified to whatever extent allowed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell, but because House Republicans acted as though on this day, December 18, their actions would actually have some effect on the outcome. Because even IF the Senate had 67 votes to convict Viceroy Trump, that WOULD NOT overturn the 2016 election. It would simply mean that the elected Vice-President takes over.

But almost every Republican who got to speak on the House floor tried to outdo themselves, as though the more ANGRY and HYSTERICAL they got and THE MORE THEY SHOUTED AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS, the more objectively valid their arguments would get. They seriously acted as though this was the worst thing in the world, as if the other party were only impeaching their president for totally partisan reasons, and AS IF that had never happened before. But it is not the worst thing in the world. Unless Mitch knows something I don’t, he IS going to quash this thing in the Senate. And if he doesn’t, the Republican President is Mike Pence.

And the impression I got from the Trump Organization employees who used to be the Republican Party is that the most horrible thing in the world, the thing that we MUST avoid at all costs, is letting Mike Pence become president.

Maybe they know something we don’t.

But really, when it came to raving like a fanatic in the throes of supernatural possession, the real cherry on this seven-layer shit sundae was the appropriately named Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who actually said, “When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than Democrats afforded this president in this process.”

This may seem like a strange question to ask of a conservative Christian, but: Has this guy actually READ the Bible?

And I’m guessing he’s not a Catholic, but does he know the saints?

Saint Valentine: “I heard confessions and was sent to prison by the Romans, where I died.” Saint Sebastian: “I defended Christ and was shot full of arrows.” Saint Lawrence: “I protected the poor, and was roasted on a gridiron.” Saint Donnie: “I did everything for these Christians, I gave them two Justices, I got the embassy moved to Jerusalem, and the Democrats hated me before I was even elected, and then I twisted Zelensky’s arm for dirt on Joe Biden, which is totally legal and very fair, and they impeached me!! Treason. Very unfair.”

“…Wow, dude. Must be tough.”

But face it Democrats: this really IS all your fault. You know that the Republicans don’t have any original ideas. First they stole everything from the libertarians, until they figured out that there aren’t any libertarian votes, at which point they stole from left-populism, which in their hands is Huey Long at best.

In this case, the lesson they stole from Bill Clinton and his Democratic Party was: Never give up. Always defend your Leader. No. Matter. WHAT. No matter what comes out after you stake your position. No matter what he does to embarrass himself, and by extension, you. No matter what the risk that you will lose your job next year so that he can keep his for one more day. Will you be vindicated by history? No. By God? Maybe not. But you’ll get to keep power for a little while longer, and you’ll never have to admit you were wrong. And really, aren’t those the most important things in life?

In choosing to repeat history – the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy – the Republicans have not absolved the Democrats of their historical error, but in choosing to compound it, they have made the Democrats look relatively less corrupt in comparison, which in this political environment may as well be the same thing.

They have their legacy, Republicans. And you have yours.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

-Edmund Burke

I don’t want to deal much with Viceroy Trump anymore, because there’s not much new to say, and the subject is just depressing. And not just because of the Right, but because of the whole two-party dynamic. As the House Judiciary Committee passed two Articles of Impeachment Friday, some people were sending signals that some Democrats in pro-Trump states were willing to compromise by suggesting that censure would be preferable to impeachment. In fact one Democrat who refused to consider impeachment, New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew, is deciding to join the Republican Party. But there was another thing that happened during the case earlier in the week. On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did a press conference with Adam Schiff and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler to announce the two articles of impeachment, but about an hour later she came to the cameras again to announce that Congress had agreed to the updated US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (or as the Administration calls it, USMCA).

Republicans have been whining all this time that Democrats have hated Trump from Day One, which is certainly true, and that they’ve been plotting to impeach him from Day One, which is not necessarily true. If legislation like the trade deal was more the rule than the exception, impeachment might not have happened at all. After all, Democrats really hated George W. Bush for his Electoral College victory, but they worked with him. They even authorized his war in Iraq. And that’s because they didn’t want to be seen as going against the president. Which only points up the fact that whatever you think of W, he at least tried to be the President of the United States, and not the unilateral boss of a Trump Organization that happens to include a government.

The other factor in this is that under Bush the two parties were actually cooperating to a certain extent on legislation, as opposed to Trump, who goes back on deals simply because he can, and because he actually thinks that the definition of ‘fair deal’ is “I get everything I want, and you get nothing.”

With the USMCA, 75 percent of automobiles sold in North America must be produced in the region, and 40 percent of cars must be made in factories that pay workers at least $16 an hour. The Trump Administration got the deal it wanted, but also made these concessions to Democrats and labor unions. Democrats also got the removal of a provision protecting the property protections of big pharmaceutical companies. At the same time the Administration got the Democrats to lift their demand to remove liability protections for Facebook and Twitter. Legislation got accomplished because each side got at least a little bit accomplished. Some of you might be too young to know this, but that is how the two elected branches of government used to work.

You’re not going to see that kind of compromise on impeachment. A censure resolution would have been the sensible bipartisan compromise, but if the two factions of the duopoly were still capable of such, we wouldn’t be here. It is true that some squish Democrats would like to have a censure instead of an impeachment, but their political future is not endangered if they go one way or the other. Whereas for a censure resolution to pass, Republicans would have to join it, and the entire Party has staked its entire identity on the defense that their sweet little boy never ever ever ever ever did anything wrong. Even a censure would undermine that defense, and any Republican who voted for such would be branded a RINO, and all the redcaps would be, perhaps literally, screaming for their blood, and trying to primary them out of the Party with anybody they can get, even if it’s just a mannequin with a tape recorder of Trump’s speeches inside it.

You know, like Matt Gaetz.

The fact is that the likely result is the best and most practical compromise that’s going to happen: The Democrats in the House will have a party-line vote to impeach, the Republicans in the Senate will have a party-line vote to acquit, the Democrats will get to tar Trump going into his re-election campaign and the Republicans will still get to have their little boy as King. Plus which, if getting legislation accomplished under a Republican President is apparently a liability for Democrats, then the last thing they should want is to let Mike Pence complete Trump’s term, because he might get more negotiation accomplished since he does a better imitation of a human being.

You got a compromise on the North American trade deal because both parties could get something out of it. You will not get a compromise on impeachment because Republicans will not get anything out of it and Democrats have no incentive to back off. And you have to consider, Democrats: if you’re asking Republicans to agree with your position that a sleazy pathological liar is morally unfit to be president, (a position, as with white supremacy, where your two parties seem to have switched places) I have to ask why they would. Republicans do not agree with you on taxation or redistribution of capital. They do not agree with you on abortion. They do not agree with your “diversity” and social agenda. And you are asking them to help you remove the best advocate they have.

I nevertheless have to ask Republicans: Best advocate for what?

On December 10, paleoconservative website The American Conservative published a piece by Daniel Larison, simply titled “The Case For Impeachment Is Overwhelming.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-case-for-impeachment-is-overwhelming/

Larison says, “The case for Trump’s impeachment seemed quite strong more than two months ago, and the evidence provided to the House’s impeachment inquiry has strengthened it further. The president’s abuse of power is not in dispute. It is clear that he used the powers of his office in an attempt to extract a corrupt favor for his personal benefit, and this is precisely the sort of offense that impeachment was designed to keep in check. It doesn’t matter if the attempt succeeded. All that matters is that the attempt was made. It is also undeniable that he has sought to impede the investigation into his misconduct. The president has committed the offenses he is accused of committing, and the House should approve both articles of impeachment. ” He then says, “The president doesn’t have a credible line of defense left. That is why his apologists in Congress and elsewhere have been reduced to making increasingly absurd and desperate claims. The president’s defenders want to distract attention from the fact that the president abused his power, violated the public’s trust, and broke his oath of office, but these distractions are irrelevant. “

That doesn’t stop them from trying, even in this magazine. In reaction to the Conservative victory in British elections, American Conservative writer and senior editor Rod Dreher looked at the liberal media culture in this country that rooted for Labour, and said “these NYT clowns are just daring me to vote for Trump”. He earlier said, in reference to an internal debate within conservative Christianity, that “While some Evangelical leaders have gone way, way over the top with their Trump enthusiasm, it is an inconvenient truth that the short-fingered vulgarian from Queens, who has given no evidence of being a Christian in anything but name only, is the only major Republican figure who seems willing to side with us deplorable Bible-thumpers on these matters. “

A while ago, after a vacation in Spain, Dreher did an analysis of the state of Christianity there, finding it to be a hollow shell in a secularized social-democrat culture (like the rest of Europe) and reviewed it in terms of how it got to that point, only a few decades after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Dreher examines the Spanish Civil War largely in terms of how awful the Socialists were, but concludes not only that “had Franco not won, Spain would almost certainly have fallen under left-wing dictatorship, and been no better off — and perhaps worse off” but “Franco was not a good man, and that there’s really no way for Christians to get around that fact.” In reviewing a Franco biography by Peter Hitchens, Dreher grapples with Hitchens’ question: “How do we defend what we love without making false alliances with cynical powers?” Even then, Dreher says after returning from Spain, “We have already seen, in the example of Trump, that conservative Christians will embrace politically a bad man, not because they have any love for him but because unlike left-wing leaders, he doesn’t despise them, and seek to demonize them.” (Of course, simply because you’re exploited for your votes rather than demonized doesn’t mean that your manipulator doesn’t despise you, and I’m not sure Dreher admits this to himself.) And that while Dreher would prefer not to choose a “lesser evil” in such a way that it leads to something like the Spanish Civil War, and seems to blame the Left for letting things get to this point, “I also deeply wish that American Christians would recognize that our strength in American culture, political and otherwise, is superficial, and politics alone cannot sustain what has decayed from within.”

TAC writer Grayson Quay reaches a similar conclusion: “After all that bloodshed, repression, and censorship, the best that can be said is that what would have happened in the ’60s happened instead 20 years later with a slightly more punk-rock flavor. In fact, he may have done more harm than good. To this day, Spanish Catholicism and conservatism are, in the minds of many Spaniards, tainted by Franco’s legacy. … At the time of Franco’s burial, the unmistakable message of the basilica that served as his tomb was that Satan’s minions had been vanquished and the Caudillo could enter eternal rest secure in the knowledge that he had saved Catholic Spain. After his exhumation (in October), the message for us is that the Christendom that endured from Constantine until the middle of the 20th century cannot be preserved, certainly not by force. If we try, we’ll only make things worse. “

If we are to agree that Francisco Franco was not a fascist, but simply a pragmatic right-winger who took extreme but necessary actions against radical socialism, and we are to interpret Trump on the same lines, then by Dreher’s own analogy, the best-case scenario is one where the public abandons traditional religion and embraces hard-socialist politics within a generation after the death of El Caudillo. Again: that’s the BEST case scenario, because Franco was actually competent. For one thing, just because Hitler helped him get to power, Franco didn’t feel obligated to become his puppet in foreign affairs. Trump is another story.

I know that Pat Buchanan and maybe Rod Dreher would prefer Francisco Franco to Barack Obama, but Trump is not General Franco. He’s Archie Bunker without the intellectual depth.

So on one hand you have a respected hard-right website where one of the senior columnists says that even if conservatives should prefer Trump to a Democrat opponent, the case for impeachment is overwhelming. And then you have an editor at that site saying essentially, “to hell with the facts, I have faith.” And then he laments that the next generation considers faith to be morally inadequate.

I quote Rod Dreher this much not just because he is probably the most articulate advocate for the “trad” position in political writing, but as a writer who touches on politics as much as religion and culture – because of course they are all related – he is also one of the more articulate advocates for what I call the Trump rationalization. Unlike outright Trumpniks who embrace malice and anti-logic, Dreher presents his case from the view of a principled man who feels forced into his current alignment by the impression that the only other path in the political system would be far more immoral – which is of course the same presentation as a lot of other conservatives who use a lot less theology to get there. But this presentation is based on the critical error of assuming that Trump is like Franco in being a ruthless pragmatist in defense of what could be seen as a greater cultural crusade. Trump only cares about his own self-preservation and indulgence, and was very much a part of the secular culture he now aligns against. He only picked up with “conservatives” because he shares many of the same prejudices. He is lying to them in the same way that pre-Trump Republicans lied to libertarians, only with far greater consequences, not just because of numbers because traditionalists and populists are far more inclined to use government to punish the people they hate. And Dreher repeatedly brings up how Franco’s ruthlessness in defense of the Church only served to taint the Church by association. When Trump is gone – or if he ends up losing the next year and taking the Senate with him – Dreher and other traditionalists will be in the same position as Trump’s Atlantic City creditors, along with his two-and-counting ex-wives.

Dreher may think the popular culture hates people like him now, but before 2017, there wasn’t that much rationale for such hatred. But when you push a bill to re-implant an ectopic pregnancy when all medical knowledge says that’s impossible, it makes people think you don’t actually care about the welfare of the unborn. And when you wail about the precedent set by Bill Clinton’s perjury and adultery and wish to absolve Donald Trump of far worse, it makes people think you weren’t serious about morality and precedent the first time. It’s almost as if Christians DON’T believe that there is a supernatural authority that judges us in the afterlife, because they sure don’t act like it.

Dreher is correct when he says leftists would hate people like him regardless, but that just means that all you can control is your own actions. Apart from supernatural revelation, the only way you can judge the morality of Christians is by their actions. And just as Dreher himself left the Catholic Church over its corruption, many people have judged that religion is not a moral guide and is in fact destructive to moral growth. And just as the Church tainted itself by association with the authoritarian Franco, professional Christians are creating a better advertisement for socialism than the socialists themselves could accomplish with their limited imaginations. It doesn’t help when “conservatism” has embraced all the intellectual vices that both conservatives and Objectivists had observed in the Left.

Republicans were so obsessed with their hatred of Clinton Democrats that they decided that the only way to beat them was to become them. Not just in the sense that they worship a slick, superficial salesman, but that they offer the exact same excuses in his defense, such as “you can’t impeach a president who’s committed no real crime when the economy is good!” They were so jealous of the success of postmodernism that they embraced it (‘truth isn’t truth‘). And they were so obsessed with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that they embraced its amoral pragmatism as a how-to guide, so that any trick is fair as long as you win (‘The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical’) and that the opposition must be not simply opposed but literally demonized (‘[Christ] allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other’).

But if there is any sentiment in the “conservative” movement that combines secular error with magical thinking, it’s a certain flimsy New Age-y pop philosophy that “only the present is real.”

While one could make a case in philosophy that the present is the only reality, this has never been a conservative argument. G.K. Chesterton was famously quoted as saying “tradition is the democracy of the dead.” Edmund Burke is counted as the father of conservatism in the Anglosphere, and he is quoted as saying “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” (He is also quoted as saying: ‘the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’) But more broadly, a disregard for the past is a disregard for how things got to a certain point, a disregard for the idea that actions have consequences, and a disregard for the very concept of causality. Forget Judgment Day: To act as though Republicans themselves had not impeached a president for far less than Trump’s acts is to deny the precedent they set (just as Democrats ignore the precedent they set in enabling Clinton’s criminality). It is to deny their very agency in the matter. It is to act as though we are not setting an additional precedent and that by sheer stubbornness and will, we can stay in the present moment forever. As such, Republicans are not simply Donald Trump’s defense team, but his co-conspirators.

And if conservatives persist in defending the unlimited powers of Donald Trump, as if the office were only synonymous with him, and that is a legal precedent that stands by their actions, then when a future Democrat President signs executive orders jacking the top tax rate to 95 percent, or mandating federal funding of abortions, then the eternal present for conservatives will be full of tears, and very, very long indeed.

Fuck You, Rand Paul.

This is the first time in this essay that I have used the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul. There will be many more.

Because Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky appeared with Donald Trump on Monday night at a rally to get out the vote for Republican Virginia Governor Matt Bevin – and you already know where this is going – and decided to impress his boss. He told the crowd, “We know the name of the whistleblower,” referring to the hitherto anonymous White House insider who first reported Viceroy Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine – and later told reporters, “I’m more than willing to (name the whistleblower) and I probably will at some point…There is no law preventing anybody from saying the name.”

So let me begin my remarks with the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul.

I say this because as at least one journalist pointed out, Rand Paul HAD said, in 2014, ““We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions”.

2014 Rand Paul: thinking about ways to "expand the whistleblower statute to government contractors."

“We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions,” https://t.co/pbqQ69lpyI

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 5, 2019

The Daily Beast reported on November 6: “Shortly after Sen. Paul tweeted out an article that speculated in considerable detail about the identity of the whistleblower—with a photograph, a name, and details about the purported political history of a CIA professional—Russian state media followed suit.  As if on cue, the Kremlin-controlled heavy hitters—TASS, RT, Rossiya-1—disseminated the same information. But unlike Rand Paul, one of the Russian state media outlets didn’t seem to find the source—Real Clear Investigations—to be particularly impressive, and claimed falsely that the material was published originally by The Washington Post. “

According to Politico, within American media, “only a small cable TV channel supportive of the president and an ostensibly nonpartisan news site have each published the purported name of the whistleblower.”

So fuck you, #redpaul.

If I ever got one of those deep interview shows like Bill Maher or Henry Rollins or Zach Galifinakis, and I got the chance to interview Rand Paul, the first question I would ask him is this:
Senator, at what point in the Trump Administration did you decide that libertarianism equals kissing Donald Trump’s ass?

That isn’t even the worst of it. Rand Paul has been a dillhole for reasons completely unrelated to Trump. Most conspicuously, just this July Rand Paul and Mike Lee (R.-Utah) put a procedural hold on a bipartisan bill to help cover the medical costs of 9-11 first responders on the grounds that it was adding to our growing deficit. Jon Stewart, who has spent much of his time since The Daily Show advocating for 9-11 firefighters in Congress, told journalists, “He is a guy that put us in hundreds of billions of dollars in debt…. And now he’s going to tell us that a billion dollars a year over 10 years is just too much for us to handle? You know, there are some things that they have no trouble putting on the credit card, but somehow when it comes to the 9/11 first responder community—the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the volunteers, the survivors—all of a sudden, man, we’ve got to go through this.” In response, Paul referred to Stewart as “a scalawag and a ragamuffin.” (That’s another question I’d like to ask: ‘Senator Paul, on the scale of 19^th Century insults, is ragamuffin a more or less insulting word than mountebank?’)

When I try to tell people that we’d be better off with a more libertarian approach to government, their usual reaction is that the premise of libertarianism is not freedom and tolerance for everyone, but “Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine.” And you know why they think that? Because YOU, Rand Paul, the most prominent elected advocate of libertarianism, think this penny wise-pound foolish approach to spending is an example of fiscal responsibility.

You cut off that aid – knowing that you couldn’t do so for long but that every day you did hold it up would cost those men medical care – and THAT is the hill that you choose to fight for fiscal conservatism and saving money? When you don’t say Jack over squat about the fact that Trump is on track to rack up more money in taxpayer-funded golf trips in four years than President Obama did in eight?

Fuck you, Rand Paul.

It is time for the libertarian movement to admit that Rand Paul is to libertarians what Kanye West is to black people. Seriously, he’s just like Kanye West: all it takes is a big fat ass to change his mind.

Which gets to the other relevant subject.

As we know, incumbent Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin lost his race to Democratic challenger Andy Beshear, son of the previous Governor. Which meant voters said not only Fuck You, Rand Paul, but (obviously) Fuck You Matt Bevin, Fuck You Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell, and especially FUCK YOU, DONALD TRUMP. And Bevin is of course trying to contest the results, likely by expecting the still-Republican held legislature to back him up, except that a lot of those Republicans are publicly trying to cool down such talk. And that might because while Bevin only trails Beshear by a little over 5,000 votes, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate John Hicks got 28,425 votes.

In response to the event, the official Facebook page of the Libertarian Party did this piece, most likely written by Nicholas Sarwark: https://www.facebook.com/LPKentucky/posts/10157252121401936

“In an ideal world, we elect Libertarian candidates and advance liberty. Failing that, we push mainstream candidates towards liberty to advance the cause.

But if we can’t do those things, we are always happy to split the vote in a way that causes delicious tears. Tonight there are plenty of delicious tears from Bevin supporters.

Had Matt Bevin not ditched his liberty Lt Governor for a Mitch McConnell picked anti liberty, corrupt running mate who has tried to eliminate Kentuckians jury trial rights, had Matt Bevin not presided over a huge sales tax increase, had Matt Bevin supported any of our key issues on criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, expanded gaming, cutting taxes, or acted with the least bit of civility, we probably would not have run a candidate. Of course, he did the opposite. And here we are.

We split the vote. And we could not be more thrilled. If our friends in the major parties do not want this to happen again, they should think about passing ranked choice voting. And supporting our issues.

In the meantime, thank you to John Hicks, Ann Cormican, Kyle Hugenberg, Josh Gilpin and Kyle Sweeney for running. Your effort was appreciated.

For the Bevin supporters, your tears are delicious.”

And the comments on said Facebook page were amusing to say the least. One guy said: “What a joke. Truly embarrassed to call myself a Libertarian. Way to push people back to the two party.” Response: “Libertarian Party of Kentucky Triston Myers we looked up your voter registration. Please do not claim to be a libertarian when you are a registered Republican. Thanks for playing.”

Which pretty much sums up the “conservative” pushback in that thread.

Let’s go over this. One of the other alleged sympathizers in the thread posted, “Making the statement that you find the tears of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians delicious shows that not only will your party never actually win an election, but that you the writer of the post are a poor excuse for a human! To relish in anyone’s pain is closer to fascism than democracy!” My response: “Yeah, I’m sure all those kids in the detention facilities will be glad to hear that conservatives don’t relish in anyone’s pain.” And another person posted: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”

“Well, I’m never supporting the libertarian movement again.” Bitch, when did you EVER?
Did you vote for a Libertarian candidate? No? Are you a member of the Libertarian Party? NO? Then who cares what you think about the Libertarian Party? You have just as much right to call yourself a libertarian as Bernie Sanders. Get out of the city!

There’s a difference between a socialist who says “I vote Democratic because that’s the most practical option I have in the system” and a libertarian who says, “I vote Republican because that’s the most practical option I have in the system.” The socialists are actually moving the Democrats to socialism. The Republican Party is far less libertarian than it was even four years ago. And we know this because Rand Paul is far less libertarian than he was four years ago.

Oh by the way, fuck you, Rand Paul.

And fuck all y’all who think that the Republicans are libertarian or even the “lesser evil.” You’re the people who are making MY job harder.

You’re the people telling America, and the rest of the world, that a “small government” just means a government small enough to fit in your uterus. You don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. And by the same token, you don’t like gun control? Here’s a great way to discourage gun control AND prove you’re pro-life: Stop shooting so many people. Cause with the conspicuous exception of James Hodgkinson, most of the people who shoot up public places, mosques and synagogues aren’t fans of open borders and AOC.

You’re the people who make a fetish of tax cuts but let the Republicans pass a tax bill that primarily benefited their donors and cut state tax deductions in a lot of states. Like the man said, Governor Bevin refused to cut taxes in Virginia and passed a huge sales tax increase. And you’re accusing us of letting the pro-tax party win? I assume that you’re the anti-tax party? Prove it.

You’re the people who want us to get out of foreign entanglements but cheer while Trump betrays the Kurds one week then next week resettles our troops in north Iraq and Saudi Arabia to get everybody’s oil.

The libertarian Republican has a fat Venn overlap with the Good Christian(TM)Republican: they both profess to a philosophy that holds a higher value than the state but give greater power and authority to the state over the individual every chance they get, and never more so than under this Republican president. For example, Rand Paul.

On a related subject, fuck you, Rand Paul.

When you say, “I’m a libertarian, and I love Trump”, it’s like saying “I’m an Orthodox Jew, and I love bacon cheeseburgers.” Clearly, one priority outweighs the other.

And if you’re going to badmouth libertarians because we don’t worship Trump and don’t agree with you on abortion, or your endorsement of Republican policies that lead to less liberty and civil rights, don’t tell us that we’re letting the bad guys win. Our priorities are not yours, and when you tell the rest of the world they are, you do more to undermine the Right and give the Left a victory that they could not have achieved with their own limited imaginations and strategy.

Why, it’s ALMOST AS IF the Republican Party had been taken over as a long-term project from an ex-KGB chief to undermine the primary opponent to Russian hegemony and make the left spectrum of politics look more attractive in comparison.

And don’t whine at us cause we took votes you didn’t deserve. Cause I distinctly remember one Trumpnik friend whining after the election even though his team won.

“Nevada would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. Colorado would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. New Mexico ditto. Minnesota ditto. Maine ditto. Popular vote total ditto.” And then he went, “I am glad that your (Libertarian) votes didn’t allow Hillary to win, but that last entry would at least have kept some of her supporters from being so disruptive.”

And I wrote: “Thank you so SO much. I am going to bring up this point EVERY SINGLE TIME some liberal wants to read me the riot act cause I voted for Gary Johnson. Because we all know that if Hillary had won the Electoral College, your side would be calling me an Antichrist and their side would be buying me a beer.”

Fuck You, CNN

You know how I could say that? Because years before Trump, there were close state elections in Nevada where the Democrat won by less points than the Libertarian vote, and I heard Republicans howl like scalded cats for losing votes that they wrongly took for granted, just as the Democrats whined in 2016. And I knew that if the tables were turned and Republicans again lost a race by the third-party margin, Republicans would howl just as loud as the Clintonistas did in 2016. And wow, wouldn’t ya know, I was right.

I know that libertarians aren’t good at appealing to the center and quite a few of us take a delight in scaring the straights. Starchild. That guy who took colloidal silver and turned his skin blue. And of course, Nicholas Sarwark. But none of those guys want to separate migrant families and put them in cages. And contrary to liberal belief, the government hasn’t been run by Milton Friedman nerds for the past three years. Because the first thing those people would have told Trump is, tariff wars never work.

Now I know that liberals and conservatives might think that people like me and Nicholas Sarwark are flippant and “glibertarian,” but really, we’re just trying to make you grow the fuck up. Both “real” parties assume that the worst thing in the world would be the other party taking charge. And face it: you both have good reason to think so. In 2016, Donald Trump won Wisconsin and other states by less than the margin of Gary Johnson’s votes, and liberals wailed that the theo-fascists would take over Washington. And so they did. And this week, the “conservatives” are wailing that because of John Hicks, the socialists and gun-grabbers and baby-killers will take over in Kentucky. And they will.

Here’s the joke, neither one of your parties deserves to win, but as long as you insist that we can only vote for the two of you, one of you WILL win any given election. So the punch line is that one of you was going to win this election, and one of you was going to lose. And if Libertarians ARE an unpopular outlier, if Matt Bevin did win the last time, and he didn’t win this time, that means at least one of three things: Libertarians got more votes than last time, Democrats got more votes than last time, or fewer people voted Republican than last time. Quite likely all of the above.

Which is exactly what happened to Republicans in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran against President Obama and what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It would have happened whether Libertarians and Greens were in the race at all. So I’m not exactly shaking in my boots at all you whiners who say you’re leaving the libertarian movement because we’re not “conservative” enough for you. The reason Bevin lost is because a lot more people who used to vote Republican are leaving YOUR party, and you will continue to lose elections this way until you run out of elections to lose.

Apropos of nothing, fuck you, Rand Paul.

The fact is, Libertarians ARE the common-sense middle. Republicans think that Democrats want to turn America into a socialist nanny state. Democrats think that Republicans want to turn America into a corporatist banana republic. Libertarians think they’re both right.

At some point, the “greater evil” is going to win an election, unless one party succeeds at turning America into a one-party banana republic. And if it seems like me, and a lot of the Libertarians on Tuesday night, seem to be sliding towards the Democrats, it’s only because the Republicans are far more likely to desire that outcome. To paraphrase David Frum: If democracy interferes with the conservatives’ agenda, they will not modify conservatism, they will abandon democracy. But in the meantime, Democrats are going to win elections, just as Republicans were killing Democrats (figuratively) until everybody saw how incompetent they were. Is this the end of the world? Cause it’s happened a lot. I think back to that guy in the forum who said: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”

Because after all, we are Libertarians. We have survived the end of the world more times than you can count. So in between these races, we have to live our lives as though the world didn’t end.

In fact, I would say that’s one implicit point of the libertarian movement: the idea that politics, conquest and domination are not the be-all and end-all of existence.

Because as we have seen, there are worse things in the world than losing. You could proverbially win the whole world by selling your soul. You could seize power by hook or by crook (emphasis on the crook) and once in charge become such insufferable, cretinous goons that the rest of the country got over how much they hated Those Other Guys and voted for them to flush you out because they hate you that much more. And so the “worst thing in the world happens” because you practically begged for it.

And that’s what happens when you confuse libertarianism, small government and small-r republicanism with the anti-liberty, Big Government and anti-republican agenda of the personality cult that is currently animating the shell of the Republican Party like a pack of rats inside a week-old corpse.

In conclusion, if you the reader remember only four words from this essay, I want them to be these:

Fuck You, Rand Paul.

So…

Mitch?

Mitch McConnell?

I got a question for you…

…

…

…

You sick of winning yet?