Yeah, I guess I should “blame George W. Bush” for appointing the very first Libertarian Party past State Chairman to a Cabinet level post in his administration: Gayle Norton as Interior Secretary.

Name one libertarian-leaning public policy position she got Bush to adopt.

Just one.

And provide links to support your assertion.

I’ve asked to do that for almost two years now, and you’ve never come up with anything.

Guess I should blame Bush for appointing other Libertarians like Bill Evers, Leon Drolet and Gerald Roberts to prominent positions in his administration.

Same thing for them.

Name one libertarian-leaning public policy position that Bush adopted as a result of their advice.

Just one. With proof.

I guess I should blame Bush for hiring Peter Ferrera of the Cato Institute to work up his Social Security privatization proposal in 2004.

You mean the SSI reform he abandoned at the first sign of Congressional resistance ?

Nice try there, but the fact that GWB was a political coward on that one made Ferrara’s advice irrelevant.

Best way to win in politics: Embrace your enemies and bash your friends, especially when they’re hiring your folks to help them construct policy positions. Not!

Worst way to win in politics: Embrace your enemies just because they hire a few libertarians, proceed to ignore their advice, and then run the least free-market Republican Presidency since Richard Nixon.

I sort of go into this in more depth in my own blog post pinged above (here, but I wanted to dive in here, because I think a lot of the commentators are missing one critical fact here. If there is one thing that should begin to dawn on Republican and Libertarian activists alike, it is this:

We live in a center-left country.

That sounds, on some level, fairly intuitive and almost non-controversial, but I think the behavior, strategy, tactics, and to a large extent beliefs of a lot of us small government advocates are predicated on the idea that that is not, in fact, true. That anytime the American political scene swings to the left (which is, at least in modern American history, most of the time), it is somehow a mistake, a result of trickery or subterfuge or whatever (a smattering of expressions of that belief you can see pretty well illustrated in this comment thread). To put that another way, Americans don’t actually agree with a left-of-center approach to governance, they’re just being either tricked or forced into thinking they do.

Not only is that amazingly patronizing and condescending, I think the evidence is fairly conclusive that it’s just wrong. Obama was elected (in a relative landslide, given our day and age), and continues to hold the support of not just a plurality but a robust majority of Americans, as do most of his specific policies, not because he is a Fascist supervillain who has enacted, with the media’s help, some kind of mind control on the American voting public. In fact, the simplest answer here is really the correct one. Obama is supported by most people because most people agree with him and approve of his approach. In most circles, again, that would be noncontroversial, but I just know whoever read that sentence here probably bristled at it.

I don’t say all that to jab at liberty activists. Far from it. I say it because without an understanding of the basic playing field, we can’t hope to succeed on it. I don’t think your post is true, that we can’t hope to political have any impact. But to have an impact, I think we have to pick our battles, to articulate a persuasive case as to why policy X is bad and why policy Y is a better alternative. If you tour around most small government circles these days, that is not being done. What is being done instead is an attempt to use dog whistle buzzwords (“socialist”, “liberal”, “fascism” whatever) in place of an actual argument, to try to make the defining issue not a robust debate about this or that policy, but a national referendum on center-left vs. center-right.

Here’s the hard truth: we have succeeded in pushing for that national referendum, and we have very convincingly lost it. We succeeded in 2008, and lest there be any doubt about “buyer’s remorse”, the moment we succeeded in making NY-20 a referendum race, we got a clean answer: the Democrat representing Obama’s policies swing from 22 points behind to winning the district. The simple truth is that Obama is accurately and in good faith representing, as he was elected to, the views and inclinations of most of America. And Scott Murphy will be doing the same for his district.

We can’t keep assuming that there is a silent majority of “real Americans” out there and all wee need to do is blow the dog whistle and they’ll be activated. We can’t keep assuming that because it simply isn’t true. Where we have managed to swing things to the right—say, the Reagan era, Contract with America, etc—we have done so my articulating a specific and well chosen list of conservative objections and persuasively making our case on those points. We didn’t win those eras because America was just naturally settling back to its resting point of political attitude (conservatism), we did so because we got out there and made the case better than they did (because, I believe, we’re right, which is different than saying everybody else agrees with us automatically).

What the right has done in the last several months is fall into this trap of just kind of waiting for center-right majority America to turn on Obama. My guess is they keep waiting right through huge losses in 2010 and Obama cruising to reelection with Reagan-like numbers in 2012. At some point, we need to stop and reassess.

Passion and a belief in the rightness of our cause (assuming even that that cause is viewed the same by all of us, which I’m suspecting is most definitely not the case) is not enough. We actually have to change minds. The only way we can even begin to do that is if we make a sober and lucid assessment of the battlefield.

Those few on the Right, who denounced the US Military and the War in Iraq, are to blame for our current downturn in support for the GOP. This is the one thing that Patriotic American voters, mostly Blue Collar men, (Firefighters, Police Officers, Northeastern guys, tough Michiganders, et.al.), liked about Republicans: That they were tough on Al Qaeda and Islamo-Fascism.

Then we turned them away by this attitude of “Well, we’ve got an Anti-War faction too.”

They said “fine… I agree with Obama on economics, and you’ve given me no reason to support the GOP on foreign policy.”

If we had stood firm in favor of the War in Iraq, maybe some of those Blue Collar guys would have stuck with us.

But as it is, we got a little “wobbly.” Even Bush (Rice, Cheney and ther others), got wobbly towards the end, as well.

Guess I should blame Bush for appointing other Libertarians like Bill Evers, Leon Drolet and Gerald Roberts to prominent positions in his administration.

I guess I should blame Bush for hiring Peter Ferrera of the Cato Institute to work up his Social Security privatization proposal in 2004.

Best way to win in politics: Embrace your enemies and bash your friends, especially when they’re hiring your folks to help them construct policy positions. Not!

I think the first step is admitting that most Libertarians were wrong all those years bashing Bush and the Republicans. Look what it has given us: A severely weakened GOP, which amounts to the only hope of any sort of opposition to Obama’s Fascism.

The only people to blame for a “severely weakened GOP” are the Republicans, like you, who stood by and said nothing while George W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress expanded the size and scope of government at a pace unprecedented since the days of LBJ.

The only people to blame for a “severely weakened GOP” are the Republicans, like you, who stood on the sidelines and cheered while George W. Bush and his puppet master Dick Cheney led us into a war based on lies and faulty intelligence and then, even after toppling Saddam Hussein, failed to follow through on anything approaching a viable post-war plan — resulting in a quaqmire that lasted six years.

The only people to blame for a “severely weakened GOP” are the Republicans, like you, who backed crappy candidates like Rudy Giuliani (Mr. $ 40 million for one delegate) and then slavishly followed the line when the crappiest candidate of all, John McCain became the nominee.

Don’t blame me, I opposed all that bullshit. I opposed Giuliani. I vowed never to vote for John McCain the moment he flushed the First Amendment down the toilet. Don’t blame me, I vote for Bob Barr.

It’s people like you who need to look in the mirror

As for the glowing USA Today/Gallup poll, once again they are not the only measurement of the American public’s approval or disapproval of Obama and his presidential ‘performance.’ The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for April 24 shows that while 36% of the nation’s voters strongly approve of the job Obama is doing, 31% of voters strongly disapprove, giving him a Presidential Approval Index rating of +5, hardly the margin you might expect from an “unstoppable” President.

RealClearPolitics shows that polls taken between March 31 and April 23 of this year illustrate the American voters continued disillusionment with the direction of our country with an average of 54.4% of the voters saying we’re moving in the wrong direction and 38% believing we’re moving in the right one.

Yes, conservatives and libertarians are discredited by the Bush years and yes, Obama does have the support of many Americans. But those numbers are becoming fewer and fewer each day. 51% of Americans interviewed by Rasmussen Reports viewed the Tea Parties favorably and 25% of those interviewed said they personally knew someone who attended a Tea Party. I’m pretty sure most of those folks aren’t big Obama supporters. And then we have the stunning 11% that would actually support their state seceding from the United States–one in ten! Sheesh. Do these sound like people that are happy with the three-ring Obama-and-Pelosi spending circus going on in Washington?

Then we have my personal favorite, the MSNBC Live Vote: Give Obama a Grade. As of this writing, over three million people had responded–and the F’s were leading the A’s 39% to 37%, with a few B’s, C’s, and D’s thrown in between. The gap has been even larger in days past; I checked at one point and the F’s were leading the A’s by six percentage points. I bet Chris Matthews is starting to wonder if that thrill up his leg is going to be followed by something that will bite him on the butt.

We do need to fight like hell to stop this madness in its tracks, no doubt about it. People that rely on the MSM for their news (unfortunately, most of America) are not going to hear about a lot of the underhanded, overblown agenda of this anti-American administration. So we need to do whatever it takes to get the truth out–Tea Parties, advertisements, Revolutionary War re-enactments, blogs, boycotts, reading aloud from the Constitution and Bill of Rights from every street corner in America–whatever works. It’s a sad fact that most people are woefully ignorant of everything that’s at stake, so we must educate them and fast. However, we cannot for one minute let ourselves think that Obama can’t be stopped and that everything we love about our country will be lost. Every military and survival instructor worth their salt will tell you the key to staying alive and in the game is largely psychological. To be trite, if you think you’ve lost, you have. Well I, as well as many others in the oft-dismissed and dissed flyover country, have no intentions on losing. The cretins in the Capitol may be in it for the long-haul, but so are we. Nobody said it would be easy, but nothing worth having ever is.

That is why the GOP is such an easy target today. Blaming libertarians is just silly.

“We’ve seen the enemy, and it is ourselves.”

I’d ask you to speak for yourself, Mr. Self-identifying-libertarian-who-is-supposedly-not-a-collectivist, but since you defend exactly the types of big government policies President Obama is implementing, you may mean “ourselves” to be big government GOP. In that case, you’re correct. It is you.

The practitioners can call themselves whatever they wish. Lincoln would still say that dog only has four legs. I condemn their actions. I have no problem with GOP members that support small government, fiscal restraint, and the rule of law. When I see them, I tell them so.

If you all are looking for someone to blame for the rising tide of Fascism in America via Obama, look in the mirror.

All you all who bashed Guiliani are to blame. All you all who called Bush a “nutty social conservative,” or “NeoCon,” are to blame. All you all who wouldn’t lift a finger to help the GOP cause these past few years, cause it might be seen as “damaging to the Libertarian Party,” are to blame.

Look in the mirror you all.

“We’ve seen the enemy, and it is ourselves.”

Politically many Libertarians will never be happy and will happily have a greater evil than a lesser one like Ron Paul that shares many of their values. This is documented fact. At present any Republican with some Libertarian ideals will come from the Ron Paul faction and to many Libertarians that is unacceptable.

You don’t need to believe in a particular theory just that WE NEED A NEW INVESTIGATION before we commit more troops to the Afghanistan War.

9/11 Truth throws all Neo-Cons and Bush people under a new bus, the Ron Paul movement will provide you cover.

Obama won’t support it because he is committed to send more troops to Pakistan and Afghanistan, its the shatterpoint for him. The Left’s Anti-war will start soon to question 9/11 also. The brave republicans/conservatives now that would support 9/11 truth separates them from the Bush Torturing Neo-Cons.

We need a new investigation into the single event that has defined this decade. We can agree that the whole story hasn’t been told. The people on the commission have admitted that.

Lets do it before this giant error grows bigger.

It wasn’t just those RINOs you speak of that were silent as George W. Bush proceeded to screw us all over — the so-called fiscal conservatives kept their mouths shut as well.