Libertarians in Media are clueless about the military

Gun Toting Socialist, David Weigel

There's no warfare like class warfare.

One of the sad things about the true Right, which includes libertarians, is the utter absence of military knowledge in the ranks of their scribes.  It is not an issue that many of us with decades of military experience are not libertarian, no it is just odd that magazines like Reason cannot manage to assign a single story that relates to the military to anybody with a day's worth of experience in uniform.  Worse than that, a basic item of being libertarian in America is actually knowing what is in the US Constitution.  This works out great when libertarians publish articles about marijuana legalization or abuses of police power, but they seem to have skipped Article 1, Section 8 when topics like Marines badmouthing the Commander-In-Chief pop up.

In his latest David Weigel impression, Mike Riggs tosses this bit of class warfare into the cloud:

Mike Riggs, David Weigel Impersonator

Dissenting While Enlisted Will Get You Fired, Dissenting While Commanding Gets You Retired

Riggs tosses out the false comparison between the treatment of a General who illegally badmouthed Vice President Biden and was summarily retired, with the treatment of a Marine Sergeant who was discharged, with nine years of service, for badmouthing the President.


Article 1, Section 8, states in part:

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

The Congress is empowered, actually commanded by the States to regulate the affairs of military people in a manner that they cannot do to civilians through the "organizing, arming, and disciplining" portion of the document that most libertarians hold dear.

In this case, it is a simple principle that crosses both government service and private employment grounds: badmouthing the boss can have severe consequences.  On a related point, Riggs' lack of knowledge is telling:

Could those remarks be interpreted as "prejudicial to good order and discipline"? I guess that depends on your rank. They were bad enough that Obama told McChrystal to resign or be fired, but they weren't bad enough for McChrystal to be discharged. 


Riggs' concept of what "be fired" means for a soldier amounts to getting a transfer to a new department, or being moved to a smaller office, like some screwup at the EPA.  Not the case.  Be fired means getting booted from the service, but it usually does not mean losing one's pension.

I know a retired Command Sergeant Major who was famous for this with the senior NCOs within his domain for infractions arguably much more severe than this, usually dereliction of duty related violations.  He would show up where the NCO was supposed to be working, knowing full well that they would not be there, track the NCO down and shove a resignation letter and a list of charges before the NCO, giving the NCO his choice of retiring or fighting the charges.  They always chose retirement.


Additionally, Riggs appears to be under the impression that a Sergeant got screwed out of a retirement check.  As most all Service Members know (as well as many other people), you are not eligible for retirement after only nine years of service.  If this Marine had 20 good years of service, odds are overwhelming that he would have been forced out as a retiree, just like the General.  Fact is, he was not even half-way to retirement so the point is moot.

Another factor here is the liberaltarian leanings of Reason magazine.  Their writers and readers tend to have the same attitude toward the US Military as college Liberal Arts professors and their fellow travelers at The Daily Worker, The Nation, Slate and MSNBC.
Update: Looks like Nick Gillespie, aka The Jacket of Reason, get it but he does not get to expand on how he came to his correct conclusion. Redeye from 5 APR 2012.

Ron Paul: Politician, Obstetrician, Gynecologist, and Zionologist

This is what a Zionologist looks like.

If it is a new election cycle, it is a new round of Dr. Ron Paul controversy.  By far the most popular one is the alleged racism towards Blacks by the House of Representatives member for Texas, an issue that crops up like clockwork every four years.  Another is the growing evidence of Ron Paul's thinly veiled antisemitism.

Gun toting Socialist, David Weigel

This post is not so much about Paul's racism as much as it is about the antisemitism.  David Weigel of Slate produced some historical evidence linking Paul to racist comments in his news letter and he has been following this issue for several years.  If you did not know, Weigel is a fired Reason staffer who interviewed Ron Paul in 2007 about his 9/11 Trutherism.  In the comments of that article one Eric Dondero, now a source about Ron Paul's alleged lack of racism in almost every blog besides Reason's, claims to have been given a $10,000 bonus by the Ron Paul machine before departing and clams that he was not fired (this was the first link in the Eric Dondero search of the Reason blog).  Ron Paul's office has been claiming for years that Dondero was fired.  If you want to know more about Ron Paul and his decades long bigotry controversies, please point your favorite search engine in that direction.  This post ties Ron Paul to Zionology.  Not as a pioneer or researcher, more as an evangelist and it matters little if he is a knowing or unknowing practitioner.

The practice of Zionology, also known as Soviet Anti-Zionism, appears to have originated in the Ukraine.  The brief Wikipedia article on the topic currently describes it as:

Soviet Anti-Zionism was a doctrine promulgated in the Soviet Union during the course of the Cold War, and intensified after the 1967 Six Day War. It was officially sponsored by the Department of propaganda of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the KGB. It alleged that Zionism was a form of racism and sometimes argued that Zionists were similar to Nazis. The Soviet Union was officially opposed to racism of any kind, and therefore Zionologists stated that they were not anti-Semitic or racist themselves.

The way this has played out over the years is similar to the Stalinist Soviet view that National Socialism is Right Wing, a falsehood which over 90% of the people educated in the West since World War II believe.  In the same repetitive manner, Soviet attacks on Israel took on a life of their own through the Stalinist fellow travelers in the commanding heights of western society, eventually adopted by many who wanted to shoehorn Jews in as a scapegoat for any conspiracy that they saw.

Remember, true Conservatives tend to use descriptive words when they speak and Socialists tend to use codewords.  Socialists love to accuse people of using codewords just to call them names, or to make some false point of faith with a 'bonus' of smearing a Conservative at the same time.  Examples like "individual choice is code for racial discrimination" do not come from people who abstain from codewording, it comes from those who engage in the practice.  When you hear people complain about: The Israeli Lobby, Neo-Conservatives, Zionists, and similar, you can bet these people are engaged in codetalking to veil their antisemitism.

How does this relate to Dr. Paul?  Quite simply he uses all the right words along with the tactic of emboldening any antisemitic group that comes along.  Just see his comments on Israel vs. his comments toward Iran on very similar issues.

In a June 2011 interview with Don Imus, Ron Paul defends terrorist group Hamas, a country with a charter that calls for the destruction of Israel.  Paul attacks Israel for defending itself in a war that Hamas started.  The subject of the exchange is the legal intercept of a ship trying to run Israel's legal Gaza blockade.

Throughout the interview, Ron Paul ignores the fact that the blockade was a joint effort between Egypt and Israel gets his blame for everything.

Ron Paul thinks Hamas are the nice guys.

He opens with some non-interventionist boilerplate and then says that we have every right to intervene against Israel, justifying it with a short list of military hardware that was made in the United States.  Not one word about aid to Gaza's Hamas terrorist government.  The first paragraph of the Hamas charter for Gaza calls for the destruction of Israel and Ron Paul says that Israel created Hamas. This echoes the Soviet client state relationships during the Cold War, when they began claiming that Israel had no right to exist and started rumors that Israel was the secret puppet master behind every ill in the world.

As transcribed by The Right Scoop:

[Ron Paul] I think it’s absolutely wrong to prevent people that are starving and having problems that are almost like in concentration camps and saying “yes we endorse this whole concept that we can’t allow ships to go in there in a humanitarian way”.

I think it’s just terrible and I don’t think we should be part of it. Even though if we weren’t involved I would say nothing. So I think this would be a perfect opportunity to argue the case that, you know, “Israel, if you want to do this, you’re on your own. We’re not backing you up!”

To his credit, Don Imus tries to inform Dr. Paul that humanitarian aid was not being blocked by Israel.  Interestingly enough, Ron Paul says not a word about Egypt's blockade of Gaza, in an alliance with Israel at the time of the interview.

When the topic is an actual act of war by another country with a dedication to destroy Israel, Dr. Paul takes a different stance, the same stance the Soviets took and their useful idiots parroted around the world during the Cold War.  He says that Iran's talk of destroying Israel is just big talk and that is the way tough guys talk in that part of the world (also revealing a whole other facet of soft bigotry).  Blocking the Straits of Hormuz is perfectly understandable, in the words of Paul.

Iran says they want nuclear weapons, and Ron Paul says that Iran needs them to make things equal.  Now, just examine that for a moment.  Iran wants nuclear weapons to "wipe Israel off the map," but Paul says that is just talk.  Then Paul says that the international belligerent behind 9/11 (per US District Court, Manhattan, 23 December 2011), and funded the Hezbollah war with Israel in 2006, needs nuclear weapons to make things equal.  He also condemns the only country in the region that needed a nuclear deterrent, Israel, for having nuclear weapons.  Ron Paul has been warning of an American/Israeli invasion of Iran, that never happens, for ages.  He uses that as his basis to debase Israel and try to gain support for those who want to wipe Jews from the earth.

Ron Paul supporters have recently begun accusing the United States of bombing Iran.  They cite an article from 2003 where claims were made that a village bordering Iraq was bombed.  Frequently Ron Paul sounds like these are his closest advisers.

Countries or political movements with a stated goal to destroy Israel that Ron Paul openly supports are:

Judaism Without Embellishment

Another tactic common to both the Soviets and Ron Paul is switching public positions when it suited them, just like George Orwell's 1984.  In the case of Ron Paul, he comes out with occasional statements saying he supports Israel's right to exist, before going back to supporting any group that wants to incinerate all the Jews in Israel.  In the case of Zionology, first the Soviets published and promoted Judaism Without Embellishment, by Trofim Kichko.  When fellow travelers around the world got upset about the antisemitic contents of the book, the Soviets made an April 6, 1964 press release through their own news service, Pravda, denouncing the publication of Judaism Without Embellishment (If you have a strong stomach, you can view some of the book's illustrations  here):

LONDON, Apr. 5 (JTA) –

The Ideological Commission of the Soviet Communist Party this weekend criticized the publication by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences of the anti-Semitic book, "Judaism Without Embellishment," it was reported here today from Moscow. The book, which contains anti-Jewish caricatures reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, has already been attacked by Communist parties in various Western countries.

The Soviets continued to smear Jews internally and just three years later the Soviets dusted off, published and distributed at least 12,000 copies of this antisemitic tripe labeled as science.  The 'science' of Zionology was born in response to the 1967 Six-Day War.  The Soviets continued their 'work' in the 'field' of Zionology, publishing other antisemitic books, including Trofim Kichko's Judaism and Zionism in 1968 without much resistance by Communists in the West.  The Communists even gained a few more apologists.

Today, Ron Paul picks up the torch of Soviet Zionology and presents it to a new audience already prepared by Helen Thomas, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and of the throngs who continue to support Stalinist Socialism, as well as those who just hate Jews.

Another Soviet tactic, shared by Ron Paul, is showing off Jews in their respective camps.  This has the added benefit of giving cover to anybody who wants to join in on the race to shove Jewish Israelis into the Mediterranean.  Many keep forgetting that Socialists are Socialists first and Jewish, Catholic, Atheist, Pagan, or anything else, second.  Socialistic Jews are no different and the Soviets capitalized on this for most of the 20th century.

This is not to say that Ron Paul is a Socialist at all, far from it.  He is as far away from Socialism as one can get on fiscal issues.  That said, one can still adopt the unquestionably effective tactics of Socialistic rhetoric to use against a nation full of people that you hate.

Ron Paul has been so effective at getting his Jew hate message out that he gets financial support from White Supremacists who specialize in antisemitism and all but owns the 9/11 Truthers who blame the USA and Jews for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.  Much of that support gained when Ron Paul blamed the USA for the 9/11 attacks on the floor of the House of Representatives before the smoke had cleared.

Rival politicians who do not share Ron Paul's Zionology are attacked by Ron Paul for "hating Muslims."  There is no evidence at all that Michelle Bachmann hates Muslims.  What she does speak out against is something that Ron Paul is for, Islamic terrorist organizations that want to destroy Israel and Ron Paul translates that into Bachmann hating Muslims.

This position by Ron Paul has absolutely no basis in fact.  If all of these "Muslim haters" in the US government only wanted to murder Muslims they would be paying a lot more attention to attacking the most populous Muslim nation on earth and ignoring the seat of Islamic jihad.

For more on Ron Paul's anti-Israeli history, read this.

The Decline of Reason: Riggs Is The New Weigel

Gun toting Socialist, David Weigel

As a frequent reader and infrequent commentator at reason magazine's blog for several years, I am somewhat shocked at the latest incarnation of David Weigel, who goes by the name Mike Riggs, gracing their blog.

Like Weigel, Riggs expresses not one hint of knowing that government police power is perfectly acceptable to protect private property:
New York Judge Upholds Eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park by Mike Riggs

The new Dave Weigel Socialist at reason: Mike Riggs

Everything Bloomberg does to you is for your own good, even jail! was his tone when the city of New York finally got around to clearing out the #Occupy squatters defiling privately owned Zuccotti Park in Manhattan.  I defy you to distinguish the reason post from the worst one can find daily in the Nation or Slate for refusing to even acknowledge that private property owners have any rights whatsoever.

Bradley Gardner: Reason's Thomas Friedman

Reason no longer confines itself to being a champion of stripping real property owners of any control of their land, while bashing the police for actually doing something that they are supposed to do.  No, as if Leon Panetta, Joe Biden, Norman Fleishman, Tom Friedman (and the rest of the New York Times staff) were not falsely touting Communist China's crony capitalism (conveniently leaving out the word "crony") in the mainstream media, reason recently entertained us with this bit of Bradley Gardner pap:
New at Reason: Bradley Gardner on China’s Black Market City

Chen Mingyuan has lived here all his life, but he still gets lost every time he drives into Wenzhou. “All the roads in this town were built by businessmen, so none of them make any sense,” Chen says as we back out of what we just discovered is a one-way street. For the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure. 

The article fawns over the people of Wenzhou for building the infrastructure that the government did not build, and the Communist Chinese government for "looking the other way" so that these brave entrepreneurs can engage in commerce.  Perhaps a video of what the Chinese government does build around Wenzhou should dampen any praise for Communist engineering, or any respect for private property to build disasters waiting to happen:

Not a matter of if, but when.

Oddly, the reason take on the situation is that if the Communist government took a peek and went away, then they will continue to do so.

The government’s indifference didn’t last forever. But when the authorities got around to paying attention, they decided not to mess with a good thing. In 1985 Liberation Daily, a paper sponsored by the Shanghai Communist Party, referred to Wenzhou as a “model” for other parts of China to study. In the next year 15,000 government officials visited the city to learn, not crack down. Although bureaucrats still occasionally try to impose state controls on the city, the futility of the effort quickly becomes apparent. By now the local Chamber of Commerce has taken to negotiating trade deals both domestically and internationally because, as in most other things, the private sector is more effective here.

There was no pondering of how long it would be before the autocrats in Beijing show up to claim the "people's property" without so much as a thankyouverymuch and seizing the privately built roads and utilities.  No, the article waxed on about how this is the way Chinese capitalism works.  Something else missing was any government enforcement of contracts, but there was a slight nod to the iron-fisted loan shark enforcement that may or may not exist.

Gray-market lenders are often established, though technically illegal, financial institutions that lend primarily working-capital loans at rates as high as 10 percent a month. Contacts often modify interest rates based on how well you know them. Forms of repayment enforcement differ. Weng points out that in a community so dependent on guanxi—relationships—defaulting on a contact’s loan could blackball you from future business opportunities. Weng doesn’t clarify how defaulters are treated by underground debt collectors, but he does say they “aren’t the type of people I’d want to get involved with.”

This is an incredibly naive view of how authoritarian governments operate.  Even here in the United States, where nobody could argue with a straight face is anything approaching the authoritarianism demonstrated in China, when people make property valuable the government swoops in to take it over or get their unconscionable cut.

Reason, it has been nice knowing you as a sometime voice of reason (drink!) in a world teaming with Socialists.  Now you have joined their ranks as a sideshow act, destined to be a punchline in the monologues of David Corn and Katrina Vanden Heuvel on cable news appearances.