Given how common the complaints from the left are that the right is all racist Christian fanatics, it’d be pretty impressive — and amusing — if McCain’s running mate were Jewish (Lieberman or Cantor) or Indian-American (Jindal).
Unlike those nice Pevensie kids from Narnia, there are some bad kids in the real world — like Arkansas’s Mitchell Johnson, co-murderer of five people at his middle school in Jonesboro ten years ago and recently rearrested for weapons and drug possession and for credit card fraud (his jailtime for the multiple murders having been only seven years).
One of the more tiresome aspects of being a libertarian is being told by leftists that you’re a crypto-conservative of the worst kind who wants a new aristocracy of corporate overlords to crush women and ethnic minorities, and then being told by conservatives, often later that same day, that you’re a crypto-leftist of the worst kind who believes in the abolition of morals and the fostering of a world of anti-social nihilists who sell drugs and pornography to children.
Ah, a reminder why libertarians shouldn’t be too pained by Rudy Giuliani’s exit from the presidential race: a party at a bar here in New York City last night, full of political writer and activist types, was apparently warned not to dance. As Giuliani told the City during his (often beneficial) time as mayor, dancing is illegal here unless your establishment has a cabaret license, and enforcement of those cabaret laws resumed under Giuliani after decades of being ignored.
After the pre-New Hampshire debates yesterday, I wasn’t left thinking Hillary Clinton looked bad — her fleeting minute of controlled anger was far less creepy than the perpetual smoldering hostility McCain exudes (as in his remark about flip-flopping Romney being “the candidate of change,” which was delivered in such a menacing tone that I didn’t get the relatively benign joke at the time — it sounded more like McCain was threatening to neuter Romney or something). Nonetheless, since, last I knew, Obama was on top in New Hampshire Dem polls and McCain on top in New Hampshire GOP polls, I (more…)
As I type this, on October 19, 2007, the stock market’s dipping, and I’m reminded of how it did so exactly twenty years ago, on what was labeled “Black Monday.” Let’s take a look back my college diary from those days, with all it tells us about how weird politics at Brown University was:
