You “conservatives” and “libertarians”, who have aligned yourselves with these type of people due to a shared opposition to the war, disgust me. It’s like you all have been duped into the notion that these people actually care about civil liberties. Get a clue. Liberals do not care one iota about liberty. They don’t care one bit about the free market. All they care about is a large intrusive government that forces their collectivist ideals on the masses. They may say this and they may that, but wake up people. They are nothing but a bunch of Stalinists. ~Glen Dean

Via Clark

What is it like to be an Iraq war supporter?  What does it feel like to wake up every day and believe that roughly 95% of the world’s population is insane and bent on destroying you?  What is it like to think that one of the most miserable countries on the other side of the planet poses a direct and dire threat to you and your neighbours?  What is it like to unthinkingly follow the President?  Tell us, Glen. 

Incidentally, isn’t a war propelled by nationalistic loyalty to the state something of a “collectivist ideal” being imposed on “the masses”?  Just wondering!   

I don’t know about all liberals, but it seems to me that someone like Russ Feingold, who actually voted against the PATRIOT Act, cares a good deal more about civil liberties than the “national emergency” crowd.  Now there are liberals who endorse all of the security state legislation–the Lieberman left–who are deemed to be “responsible” on national security, which is strange.  Shouldn’t support for such measures instead be taken as proof of the inherent “Stalinism” of liberals?  Apparently “Stalinism” these days involves suspicion of and opposition to excessive and unaccountable government power–who knew? 

Of course, it is perfectly possible for a liberal to be right about the unconstitutional actions of the government in one area (unreasonable searches) and get it magnificently wrong when it comes to another area (e.g., freedom of speech in the Limbaugh case), just as conservatives who wrongly support this war are still capable of being right in their opposition to other bad government policies.  Just as the dangers of centralised government to individual liberty ought to make left-liberals opponents of centralised government action, so the damage that war does to good order, constitutional liberties, civilised norms, traditional morality and settled communities ought to make conservatives oppose war in almost every circumstance.  Failure of conservatives to oppose aggressive war doesn’t mean that they “really” hate good order, constitutional liberty, civilised norms, traditional morality and settled communities, but that their support for the war is radically out of step with everything else they do claim to believe.  It corrupts and undermines their other convictions.  Like all the left-liberals who embrace concentrated power in a mistaken belief that it will advance “positive liberty,” conservatives who support aggressive wars are usually confused and have lost touch with their foundations.  

Liberals are as humourless about matters of race as most “conservatives” are about anything pertaining to foreign policy.  For the former, you can’t tell certain kinds of jokes; for the latter, you are not allowed to say anything even remotely favourable about another country if its government happens to take a different foreign policy line from our own.  For the former, any hint of what they will deem as racism puts a person beyond the pale of civilised society–ban him, jail him, expel him!  For the latter, any hint of critical thinking about the flaws in U.S. policy or decisions to start wars shows that you must secretly desire the green flag to fly over the Capitol and want the United States to surrender abjectly to any and all adversaries.  The response to such “defeatists” is much the same as the liberal response to “racists.”  In both cases you see ideology and the desire to silence opposition winning out over critical thinking.  Those who want to cavalierly fling around accusations of Stalinism might want to look in the mirror when they speak. 

My favourite combination of these two obsessive mentalities is when some neocon democratist gets on his high horse and declares that anyone who is not in favour of killing other people to bestow freedom on them must therefore regard those people as inferior.  Only a racist could think democratising Iraq is a fool’s errand!  You must hate Arabs and freedom!

As for devotion to individual liberty, why do I think that people who endorse extraordinary rendition, the arbitrary detention of citizens and the launching of unprovoked wars are in a poor position to sit in judgement of others’ libertarian qualifications?  I can’t quite put my finger on it.