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L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 339, October 2, 2005 Tenth Anniversary Edition, Part 1
Libertarians: The Connies Speak Out Exclusive to TLE Part One was published last issue According to a television show I saw this week, Winston Churchill once said, "The further backward you can look, the further forward you can see." I know history pretty well, and what I see conservatives—let's call 'em connies—shoveling today is the same old bullshit used by Republicans in the 1950s, Democrats in the 1940s (not to mention World War I), Republicans in the 1860s, and politicians in general, probably as far back as the Sumerians six thousand years ago, as an excuse to relieve their subjects of their lives, their liberty, and their property. I'm sure back even then there were plenty of "useful idiots" to justify—in cuneiform—what the bigwigs were actually doing to people. Today our civilization is plagued by the same kind of "useful idiots". "Libertarians believe in Magic," a Republican connie bloviated, recently, in what was supposed to have been a response to "Why Did It Have To Be Guns?", an essay of mine observing that no matter what a politicians says, what he does with regard to your right to own and carry weapons tells you what he really thinks of you and your rights. (A friend of mine had posted the essay on a mostly right wing Second Amendment forum. "A Democratic Republic such as ours," the connie announced as if it were a new discovery, "doesn't operate on magic." I've no idea what I said in my essay to make this specimen think libertarians believe in magic. Mostly we're hard-nosed atheists, materialists, and anti-mystics. Indeed it's the connies who have an all-powerful Imaginary Playmate and see fairies at the bottom of their garden. What I suspect—you may recall that I've written about this syndrome before—is that the writer thought that slogan up some time ago (possibly it was the only original thought he ever had) and he was desperate to use it, however inappropriately, at some time before he died. A lot of nonsense gets written that way. His illusion that America is a democratic republic is another perfect example. In one sense, it was never intended to be—the Founders expended lots of effort to keep it from becoming one—and in another, it never has been. Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, "I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating," there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States. "There are no easy ways," this pampered darling of the two-headed Boot On Your Neck Party eructated, "to win political battles or rights." He was telling this to libertarians, who, unlike privileged and protected BOYN Party candidates, have had to petition or sue to get into every election they've run in since 1971? Who end up getting fined for running against Republican and Democratic candidates? Who find ballot boxes thrown off the back of a truck in the desert rather than allow a libertarian to occupy the seat she won fair and square in the Nevada state senate? Who are grandly informed by old men in black dresses that the plain language of the Bill of Rights somehow fails to apply inside Arizona public parks, or within the City and County of Denver? "You've got to fight every day, slug it out in the court of public opinion." How true—mostly against wasters of oxygen like him, it would appear. "If the opinion of the Elites is against us," he went on, "as it surely is concerning [the right to own and carry weapons], unremitting effort is required to provide our fellow citizens with the reasons why gun ownership is a positive, personal good for them, as well as [for] us." This would have been a useful observation fifty years ago. Today it is old news, proof that our correspondent and his fellow connies have been off somewhere with their heads wedged where the sun don't shine. His ignorance—which he waves proudly, like a flag, is appalling. Otherwise, he would be aware that, over the past quarter century, I have written a book a year, each of them asserting, to one degree or another, and depending on the particular circumstances, that "Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon—rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission." He would know about the works of Scott Bieser, Fran van Cleave, Kathryn Graham, Kent Hastings, James P. Hogan. Victor Koman, Brad Linaweaver, Rex F. May, Victor Milan, Kenneth Royce, J. Neil Schulman, Vin Suprynowicz, Susan Wells, F. Paul Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson, Claire Wolfe, and Aaron Zelman, fighting every day, slugging it out in the court of public opinion, all in support of individual liberty, and always for the right to own and carry weapons whenever the subject arises. If I've left anybody out, please forgive me. You all know who you are. Another appalling thing about this guy is his cultural inferiority complex. His use of the word "Elites"—capitalized, no less—to indicate followers of the Woman with One Eyebrow, denizens of the City of the Cockroach, bedwetting liberals, famously fearful of every known phenomenon, is abject and embarrassing, like watching a collared and broken cur, cowering and nose-whistling at the feet of its abusive master. Before he presumes to lecture libertarians again, Fido should get himself a spine. Wayne LaPierre clearly isn't using his (he borrowed Larry Pratt's for the New Orleans lawsuit), maybe he'd like to rent it out. But I digress. "Libertarians despise the majority of voters," our connie forum correspondent now proclaims. "They smear them as 'sheeple' and dismiss them as beneath contempt. But as long as we have a Democratic Republic, the majority opinion will prevail over the Elites in the end." Where do you start with a sentence like that? It's obvious the guy doesn't know many real libertarians, or he wouldn't be outgassing like this. How does he come by the knowledge that we "despise the majority of voters'? Telepathy? I never said it, and it wasn't in the essay he's supposedly responding to. I'll admit I've heard libertarians use the world "sheeple", but they certainly have no monopoly on it—I'll bet this guy uses it a lot more than we do. The only folks I've ever heard openly manifesting contempt for the electorate are Democrats and Republicans, so I have to conclude that he must be having some kind of argument with himself—somebody tell him that'll grow hair on his palms. I repeat, America is not now, nor was it ever intended to be a "Democratic Republic". (If he'd consult a dictionary with derivations, he'd discover that the term is a redundancy in any case, half of it coming from Greek, the other half from Latin, both meaning the same thing. And there's that term "Elites" again. Grovel, grovel, grovel. There's no way connies can get around it, no matter what slogans they endlessly repeat: we libertarians believe in freedom. Period. Not magic. Some years ago, the GOP was pretending to lead a congressional "revolution" for personal and economic freedom—and getting nowhere, because they weren't really interested in either. Whenever critics, especially libertarians, were rude enough to point out their failings and deviations from principle, they would whine, "The perfect is the enemy of the good"—meaning that those of us who were capable of keeping our eyes on the prize (as the saying went) were spoiling their con. I replied that if it weren't for those who insist on the "perfect" there'd never be any good. A while after that, they stopped using the slogan. Connies don't have the cojones for freedom any more. The mere existence of libertarians wounds their poor, shriveled souls, because, by supporting the right wing socialist policies of George W. Bush, they have cravenly surrendered to the left wing socialism of Hillary Clinton.
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