The always tiresome Ryan Sager, fresh off of sticking knives into religious conservatives and encouraging the GOP to commit electoral suicide by alienating its key constituency, has decided to join the Smearbund against Ron Paul.  Gosh, a non-interventionist is accused of being a racist and anti-Semite.  This is about the only things that our opponents seem to be able to say (falsely) about us.  Don’t interventionists ever get tired of distorting and lying?   Apparently not. 

Ryan Sager is an odd sort of libertarian.  He doesn’t actually seem to support any real, live libertarians, and he doesn’t seem to support any actual reductions in the size or scope of government.  His latest here is an effort to join in the chorus trashing the only small-government libertarian candidate in the GOP field.  Why is he bothering?  Because said candidate enunciated a foreign policy of non-intervention and, by extension, non-aggression, which are the traditional libertarian positions.  I have suspected that his pro-“libertarian” arguments were really just cover for endorsing social liberalism and bashing Christians–which is all that most Republican libertarianism amounts to in practice anyway–since that is the cheap poseur libertarianism I have come to expect from pundits.  Thus he welcomes the candidacy of Giuliani, who has never been confused with a defender of civil liberties at any other time in his life, and Giuliani himself suddenly worries about keeping the government out of our private lives–but only when it comes to abortion.  How noble and idealistic.