South Park Libertarians

My obsession with South Park, and the ingenious-satire of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, seems to grow by the day. Accordingly, Trey Parker, speaking before a crowd of Reason'oids at the magazine's recent conference in Amsterdam, is honored with thebokononist quote of the day:

The religious right used to be a better alternative [to Democrats]. The Republicans didn't want the government to run your life, because Jesus should. That was really part of their thing: less government, more Jesus. Now it's like, how about more government and Jesus?

You said it, man.

Since the New Deal era, a very large contingent of the libertarian vote has consistently (albeit, at times, reluctantly) backed Republican candidates at the federal level. To be sure, the H. L. Mencken's and J. A. Nock's of the world were not Hoover'ites or Nixon'ites; but, they viewed the Republican Party as the proverbial lesser of two enormous evils. In essence, many libertarians simply were not as afraid of Republicans when compared to the Democrat-alternatives. The Republicans, it seemed, would aspire for less, do less and thus, demand less from us. I think it is safe to say that this analysis has clearly changed and, for many people on my side of looneyville, the illusions of the G.O.P. are long gone.

At the risk of sounding like the conventional punditry, I am fairly confident that the Republicans are going to get spanked in November. And deservedly so. It seems that many libertarians have pulled up stakes and completely changed camps. Others have just given up. I tend to bounce back and forth 3 times per day, but on the whole, think I am somewhere in the middle. IMO, the best option for us at this point is to deliver the powers-that-be a resounding smack on the arse this fall in hopes that they will change their evil ways before 2008. Dreaming...? Perhaps.

On a related note, I know that there remain many "lesser-of-2-evil's" voters out there who will continue to support GW and the current Republican Congress based solely on the "War on Terror" and, to some extent, I understand their arguments. That being said, at some point the questions must be asked: how long can you continue to vote on this single issue while those you support continually screw you on the home-front? At what point does the "War" begin to resemble the Orwellian smokescreen employed to distract and manipulate the masses? How much freedom will you surrender? At what point will you wake up??

A Judicial B*tchslap

To the undoubted chagrin of my judicial-restraintist readers, I love it when the courts spank over-reaching States. In this instance, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a blow to the State of Louisiana and her protectionist attempts to favor local, in-state fish farmers at the expense of the rest of the planet's fishermen and Louisiana catfish-eaters. In summary, the court held that the "Catfish Statute," which statute precluded the use of the label "catfish" with respect to such fish imported from outside of the U.S., violated the dormant commerce clause. I'll forego the protracted, and quite boring, academic analysis of the judicial reasoning involved and simply murmur, Charlie Muuurphyyy - whack!