On his website, tricky Dick Morris, former adviser to Bill Clinton, claims comically to be fighting for the soul of the Grand Old Party. Morris has dubbed a potential contest between Republican presidential contender Ron Paul and President Barack Obama as “the biggest [Republican] wipeout in American history.”

Less dramatically, the Des Moines Register conceded, in the aftermath of the “the first contest of the 2012 election season,” that, while “many Iowa caucus-goers connected with Paul’s belief in less government spending and regulation, in free trade and private property rights and in opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”—they nevertheless “worried about Paul’s prospects in the general election.”

With 21.4 percent of a volatile vote, Rep. Ron Paul came in a strong third in Tuesday’s Iowa Republican caucuses. Assuming second place, and trailing Mitt Romney by eight statistically insignificant votes, was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, the dark horse in this race.

Still, what separates Dr. Paul from his Republican rivals is this: Whereas their national appeal is likely to plateau—coffined by militarism and social conservatism—Paul’s appeal, by contrast, has the potential to transcend the confines of the Republican Party.For one, Ron Paul can woo Obama’s sizeable anti-war base which is sick and tired of the killer drone. (One definition of a drone is “an idle person who lives off others; a loafer, a drudge,” a Barack Obama. Another definition of a drone is “a pilotless aircraft operated by remote control,” frequently utilized by the aforementioned “idle person who lives off others” to kill others.)

For example, Ron Paul is far more likely to work with a hero of this anti-war faction, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kucinich’s opposition to counter-productive, unconstitutional, unjust forays abroad goes back to the Balkan war (in the course of which he stuck up for the much-maligned Serbian population of Kosovo, and forewarned about empowering the Jihadist Kosovo Liberation Army).

Although a national Rasmussen Poll, conducted in December (27-28), placed Romney ahead of Obama by 45 to 39 percentage points, at 43 to 35, Obama bests Ron Paul by only eight percentage points. Another December poll (16-18), taken by CNN/ORC, revealed that Paul was already outperforming Obama among independents (48% to 47%), rural folks (52% to 45%), white voters (51%-46%), as well as among consistently reliable voters older than 65 (47%-46%). As against Obama, Paul was making strides among moderates (42% to 56%) too, and inching up with the youth cohort (47% to 53%). (PDF.)

Like it or not, this election is about the economy, subsumed within which is the issue of mass immigration.

“More than eight in ten likely Republican caucus-goers—81 percent—think it is not acceptable to allow illegal immigrants to obtain in-state tuition.” This according to a December 2011 NBC News/Marist Poll. (PDF.)

As the Center for Immigration Studies has consistently demonstrated, “enforcement approaches with no increase in legal immigration” were the most popular policy options among a majority of all voters. “Seventy percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who wanted to double legal immigration.”

Since he rightly celebrates the free, unfettered movement of goods across borders—trade—Paul’s protectionist detractors might have “deduced” that he must also rejoice in the free flow of people across our borders. As a man of the classical liberal, unquestionably American, Old Right, Rep. Paul would be wise to vigorously defend the idea of a sovereign America bounded by well-defended borders. Not only is a highly selective immigration policy an effective, non-aggressive tactic against terrorism—it is also the perfect complement to a peaceful foreign policy, predicated on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, and not on the positive, manufactured right of humanity to venture wherever, whenever.

However, positions that appeal to most ordinary Americans appall a noisy left-libertarian minority that has taken up residence in the country’s most influential newsrooms and television studios. These libertarians argue against the prevention of trespass on the grounds that restricting immigration amounts to the use of aggression against non-aggressors.

This is the case only if one rejects any form of ordered liberty; only if one believes that telling someone, “No, you can’t go there” is tantamount to violence. And only if one trivializes violence.

A well-policed barrier on the Southern border is the definitive, non-aggressive method of defense. You don’t attack, arrest or otherwise molest undesirables, who cost more than they contribute; you keep them at bay, away. Just the other day, “in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash,” Ron Paul slammed Santorum as “very liberal.” Before the surging Santorum picks up the scent of an incipient left-liberal immigration policy, and gives chase, Ron Paul ought to cement a strong, states’-rights centered stand on an issue that unites America.

As of this writing, Rep. Ron Paul—the ultimate outsider and quintessential anti-establishment presidential candidate—is the favorite to win the Iowa caucuses, scheduled to take place on January 3, 2012. Polls such as Insider Advantage and Public Policy Polling place Paul in the lead, at 23 and 24 percent respectively, to Mitt Romney’s 20 percent and Newt Gingrich’s 14 percent.

From ignoring Congressman Paul, the Republican Party establishment and mainstream media have moved to strategizing on how to discount his lead, and likely win, in Iowa.Especially exercised is the Republican Party of Iowa. Its functionaries seem willing to delegitimize Iowa poll results—and the importance of the Iowa caucuses as harbingers of things to come in the national convention—if these don’t fall in line with the Party line. Apparently, caucus-goers who dare to “reward” candidates “who are unrepresentative of the broader party” deserve to be discredited.

What Grand Old Party apparatchiks cannot accept is that voters are coming around to reality dictated truths. And when “[t]hings fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Against this backdrop, I was interviewed, on December 15, by the Russia Today (RT) television network, a broadcaster that does not abide herd behavior. Topics covered: The rise of Ron Paul, his rivals, and the Representative’s chances of parlaying his accomplishments in Iowa (to be repeated, we hope, in the Granite State and South Carolina) into a national win.

The dueling-perspectives political panel is compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and the other progressive broadcasters. Here is how it works: You invite a member of the Republican establishment—often a RINO, preferably a bimbo—to do battle with a lefty from similar circles. The sides are ideologically so close, that, in all likelihood, the panelists hang out after the show.

This format is positively postmodernist. Why? Because, by presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.

The one parallel universe is represented on Fox Business by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, and others.

Skinner is a Democratic talk show host. The description is self-explanatory. Heldman is a professor at Occidental College whose considered opinion is that “the “private sector” put us in “the economic position we are in.” Heldman, who resembles the popular caricature of Mary Antoinette, calls regularly for the heads of business people. Dowdell is one of many fast-talking Democratic strategists to plump for every imaginable assault on private property issued by Washington. Sibilia is a successful CEO who—in his monumental ignorance of the benefits that redound to society when “both capital and labor are … permitted to make their own free choices”—is demanding that corporations “be designed for the common good.” Erika Payne, among other evils, is the author of what Jonathan Alter of Newsweek endorsed as “a blueprint for a progressive conspiracy to help save the country.”

The philosophical filth spewed by such characters—almost nightly on freedom-promoting programing, no less—is that government can spend and lend to good effect; that it can tax without discouraging and disrupting production; and that our overlords in DC can regulate “better” (read energy squandering) industries into being, by steering capital and labor away from bad (energy efficient) industries (oil and gas).

You expect such illusionary presentations in the liberal media. But those whose fidelity is to reality, the founders’ Constitution, and the natural laws of economics should not have to vie for precious seconds with central planners and thieves-by-proxy on magnificent libertarian programs like the “John Stossel Show” or the Judge’s “Freedom Watch.”

In 2004, a member of Bush 43’s fantasy-based community justified the delusions and consequent budget deficits of that administration thus: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Impossible!

Certainly there is but one economic reality. And it was described by Henry Hazlitt in “Economics in One Lesson”:

• “The government’s funds all come from taxes.”
• “The government can give no financial help to business that it does not first or finally take from business.
• “When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”Government lending is as destructive as its spending.
• “The whole argument for [the government] entering the lending business, in fact, is that it will make loans to people who could not get them from private lenders. This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people’s money (the taxpayers’) that private lenders will not take with their own money.”
• “The private lenders … are selected by a cruel market test … a process of survival of the fittest. The government lenders, on the other hand, are … those who can give the most plausible reasons for making loans and the most plausible explanations of why it wasn’t their fault that the loans failed. But the net result remains; private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. … Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it. … a lowering of production which must reflect itself in a lower average living standard.”

These natural laws apply to all state endeavors.

The truth is that truth is immutable, never relative. The little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth. The above Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.

With an exception: Libraries have long since engaged in a robust debate as to how to classify Holocaust-denying literature. While admirably advocating for unfettered free access, Professor of Library Services John A. Drobnicki has suggested moving Holocaust denial out of the History section in US libraries and closer to the “Bigfoot books,” so that Holocaust denial’s Dewey Decimal designation is with “hoax materials.”

Indeed, hacks are not historians. Although the dueling-perspectives panel format would suggest it is—the economic bunk spewed by the likes of Skinner, Heldman, Dowdell, Jeffers, Sibila, and Erika Payne is no version of the truth, but a perversion of it.

A Homeric contest is underway in the USA. Rome is burning. Now is not the time to fiddle or to unwittingly defraud the public.

What a difference a few years can make. In July of 2005, cable TV’s crusaders wanted that frail stick figure, Michael Jackson, locked away forever. Jackson was a danger to “our” children, they insisted. Had not his accuser said so? The “kid” in question was a five-foot-seven, hirsute, habitual liar and shoplifter, who was following in the tradition of a family of transients and tramps.

Today, the same characters on the networks are having a whale of a time at the prospect of jail time for Dr. Conrad Murray. Murray was convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of Mr. Jackson. The pop sensation died of a fatal dose of the anesthetic propofol. It had been administered in the singer’s bedroom on June 25, 2009.

Dr. Murray, who had been out on bail, was promptly declared a dangerous offender by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor. “This is a crime where the end result was the death of a human being. That factor demands rather dramatically that the public should be protected,” said Pastor.

What a difference a day makes. Before the verdict, Murray was out and about among the public, during which time he did not put anyone under.

Jackson, whom I defended when the prosecutor known as ‘Mad Dog’ (Thomas) Sneddon picked up the star’s scent and gave chase, charging him with child sexual abuse—was a deeply disturbed, body dysmorphic, drug-addicted man. Nevertheless, he was an adult, not a child. His decisions were his to make. And Michael Jackson had hired Murray to feed narcotics directly into his bloodstream. Taking his “milk” is how the warped Mr. Jackson called this necrophilic practice.

Murray agreed to become Jackson’s personal physician for $150,000 a month but was never paid because the singer died prior to signing the contract. Dr. Conrad Murray is an odious character, but he is innocent in libertarian law. He would not be my choice for a medic, but he does not belong behind bars.

From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be. A drug purchaser and a drug pusher have agreed on an exchange. If it is voluntary and consensual, then both parties expect to benefit ex ante. A voluntary exchange is, by definition, always mutually beneficial inasmuch as, at the time of the exchange, the buyer valued the purchase more than the money he paid for it, and the seller valued the money more than the goods he sold.

There will always be meddling third parties who’ll seek to circumscribe and circumvent a voluntary activity not to their liking. Some feminists want to stop pornographers from making or consuming the stuff. Other busybodies would like to coerce adults to quit gambling. These third parties have no place in transactions between consenting adults, unless these trades infringe directly—not foreseeably—on their property or person.Ultimately any transaction that was at the time of occurrence voluntary, and hence beneficial to the participants, can, retrospectively, be denounced as harmful and regrettable.

Michael Jackson was looking to hire someone to put him under every night. Far and few are the competent, aboveboard medical practitioners who would agree to provide the type of “service” Jackson sought from Murray; the sample of highly skilled and ethical professionals willing to provide such a dodgy service is bound to be small. By definition, Jackson was looking for a risk-taker, and worse.

With a steady stream of “milk of amnesia,” Mr. Jackson should have expected an unsteady practitioner.

Were drug dealing legal, Jackson might have had access to a better class of celebrity drug pusher. However, even Mr. Jackson had to know that a medic who was prepared to anesthetize a man to sleep each and every night was not the cream of the medical crop. Poor Michael Jackson lacked the smarts to sign a contract stipulating Murray’s medical responsibilities. Had Jackson done that prudent thing, however, Murray would have likely still flouted his ethical obligations, irrespective of the Hippocratic Oath he took.

Still and all, if not for the medicine of this and the other sloppy doctors in Jackson’s employ, the singer would have ended-up dead ages ago, in a back alley, a needle stuck in his arm. In his ethereal appearance and odd appetites, Michael Jackson had always seemed closer to death even when alive.

On July 23, 2007, two men were apprehended at the scene of a crime—the Petit family home in Cheshire, Connecticut. The culprits were Joshua Komisarjevsky and his accomplice Steven Hayes. Their crimes:

• Raping Mrs. Hawke-Petit and her 11-year-old daughter Michaela.
• Strangling Jennifer Hawke-Petit.
• Setting the family home on fire, thereby killing Michaela and her 17-year-old sister, Hayley.

Dr. Petit, who had been beaten and bound in the basement, managed to escape. He had hopped up the stairs and made his way to a neighbor, who called the police. Twice alerted, the cops were conspicuous by their absence.

The crimes were premeditated. The two career criminals had stalked the Petit women. They “messaged” one another in anticipation of an orgy of violence. At one stage during the six-hour ordeal, Hayes popped out to purchase four gallons of gasoline. He also escorted Jennifer Hawke-Petit to the bank to withdraw cash. She had the wherewithal to alert a teller. Right away, the bank manager rang the police to report that a crime was underway at a home on Sorghum Mill Drive.

Hostage to procedure and self-preservation, police concerns were allayed by the late Mrs. Hawke-Petit’s optimistic assessment of the situation. She told the bank teller that her assailants were “being nice,” and that they likely wanted money, nothing more.

Last year, Hayes was sentenced to death. Komisarjevsky’s turn has arrived. In court today, Capt. Robert Vignola hearkened to Mrs. Hawke-Petit words to explain “why police decided not to enter the home.” “The police had no reason to believe anyone was in immediate danger,” seconded CNN stupidly.

Media and law enforcement are in the habit of describing a deadly home invasion as “a robbery gone wrong.” Consequently, homeowners have been culturally conditioned to consider the uninvited house guest as one would a modern-day Jean Valjean. Like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables, the “thief” is likely looking only to take a loaf of bread and leave—that is unless he openly announces his intentions to harm his reluctant hosts.

One extremely conservative writer even bristled when a news reporter broke protocol and applied the “home invasion” appellation to the offense of breaking and entering:

The sooner we lose this distinction the better! All burglars are home invaders in-the-making.

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little the occupant can do to divine the intentions of the invader. It should be assumed that anyone violating another man’s inner sanctum will willingly violate the occupant. The law should give latitude to the invaded, not the invader—it ought to regard all burglaries as potential home invasions, and forgive the resident who finds himself using deadly force to defend hearth and home. The Castle Doctrine used to proceed from just such a premise. But exceptions to the doctrine are fast becoming the rule.

If you believe in the sanctity of life you should fight for the sanctity of private property. It is a man’s right—even obligation—to defend his life and the lives of the loved ones living under his roof. Arguably, a right that is not vigorously defended is as good as a right forfeited.

Life is too precious to skirt an indelicate matter: Komisarjevsky and his accomplice entered the Petit home through an unlocked rear door. In correspondence with author Brian McDonald, child killer and rapist Komisarjevsky revealingly wrote the following:

“Hayley is a fighter; she tried time and time again to free herself. … Mr. Petit … ran away when he thought his life was threatened, and ran away to leave his wife and children to madmen… Had Mr. Petit fought back [at] the very beginning, I would have been forced to retreat. … You’re the first line of defense for your family, not law enforcement.’”

The least a man can do is to lock up the house before he retires. If he refuses to arm himself, let him arm an alarm system.

From inside his home in Cape Town, South Africa, a man close to this writer watched as two men waltzed into the back yard on a Sunday afternoon, as the family relaxed by the pool. The man saw his wife flee as in slow motion. He rushed to the safe, and retrieved the gun. He aimed at the invaders and roared, “Get the hell out of my home.” They obeyed. Since then, this man has strapped a piece to his ankle.

Petit family members or friends are particularly well-placed to take up the cause of self-defense and Second-Amendment rights.

Republican and Democratic media whores briefly came clean about ignoring presidential hopeful Ron Paul. Then they promptly returned to ignoring him.

No sooner had Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and CNN’s Piers Morgan interviewed Dr. Paul about his untouchable status among their colleagues, than John King of the eponymous CNN show could be heard recounting the winners of the Republican 2011 Iowa Straw Poll, to the exclusion of the man who secured second place: Congressman Ron Paul.

Michele Bachmann won 4,823 votes; Texas Rep. Ron Paul 4,671. With 152 votes separating the two frontrunners, one might even say that, in Ames, Iowa, Paul jostled with Mrs. Bachmann for first place.

A slick Drew Griffin, also at CNN, cracked up as he instructed a cub reporter on the ground: “If you get a sound bite from Palin bring that back to us. You can hold the Ron Paul stuff.”

Following the Republican Poll, Politico.com ran an article about Paul, the caption to which read: “Ron Paul remains media poison.” The article featured an image of Ron Paul flanked by signs touting the stuff the press finds so poisonous: “Liberty and Freedom.”

As is often the case, satirist Jon Stewart stepped in to correct—and to make fun of—the farrago of misinformation spread by mainstream media. “Why are you treating Paul like he was the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” Stewart asked party operatives. Here Comedy Central cut to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. On Meet the Press, Todd breezily announced his Republican top-tier contenders: Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

A dude on Face the Nation did the same. The Perry, Romney, Bachmann trio was touted again by Brett Baer and Chris Wallace, both of Fox News.”Aren’t you forgetting an ideologically consistent congressman who came within 200 votes of winning the straw poll,” interjected a sarcastic Stewart. Another clip of Chris Wallace came up on Stewart’s screen.

For a moment, it looked as if Wallace was going to redeem himself: “We didn’t mention and we should,” he noodled. But no, it was “Rick Santorum” that the reporter went on to will from the political grave. Santorum “didn’t get half of what Ron Paul got,” the comedian apprised the nation. “He lost to the guy who lost so bad that he dropped out of the race.” (Tim Pawlenty) “Let’s not count out Jon Huntsman” said another no-name pack animal on CNN.

Huntsman got 69 votes. If all of Jon Huntsman’s supporters met at the Iowa Ames Quiznos, the fire marshal would say, ‘That’s fine; no problem.’ Huntsman was the only Mormon running in the straw poll, and he came in second among Mormons.

So Stewart spoofed the media. “This pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist has been going on for weeks,” he said. [Make that decades.] Ron Paul “is Tea-Party Patient Zero. He’s the real deal.”Comedy Central followed with an effective demonstration of the disconnect between the arch-plotters on the panel of journalists, and the audience in Stephens Auditorium, in Ames, where a debate between the Republican rivals preceded the poll.

The people roared with approval when Ron Paul condemned America’s futile misadventures abroad. The journalists responded with a smirk and an eye roll. (And somewhere, someplace, a coquettish Ann Coulter lent a helping hand by simpering sexually over her candidate, Gov. Chris Christie.)

Yes, freedom frightens the establishment. Paul is airbrushed out of the political picture because, as he explained, his candidacy threatens the “status quo” with respect to welfare, warfare and monetary policies. Paul’s ideas are predicated on a return to reality. Paul the politician has been attempting to smash the parallel universe through which the congressional-media complex filters reality for the fools who keep falling for them. This implies reversing 100 years of fairy tales; deflating an empire built on funny money and military predation back to a republic based on private property and production.

As usual, Ron Paul has been too magnanimous about America’s media.

No matter their brand of political prostitution (Republican or Democrat), media talking heads are props to the politicos; they mirror the political class, reflecting and reinforcing the opinions—and the reality—among the elites they serve. More often than not, the chattering classes are as privileged and protected as their masters. These “Demopublican Monopolists” sense that as long as they sustain their respective constituencies, they will retain their perches and their sizable salaries.

But things are a changing. The country is changing. These B-rate minds are paddling as hard as they can to save sinecure. Even if it means not facing reality. When Standard & Poor’s downgraded America from its status as best AAA borrower, Louis Story of the New York Times was as anxious as GOP devotee Ann Coulter. Both suggested the State take action against the rating agency.

S&P signaled that as the US government loses prestige and power around the world, so too will its many tiers of top-dogs be downgraded. The statist men and women of the media are up the creek without a paddle.

More than anything they fear losing their status. Ron Paul makes these vainglorious individuals face reality when all they want is to save face.

Beltway libertarians … are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else “cool and cosmopolitan.” Judging by Reason Magazine’s “35 Heroes of Freedom,” “cool and cosmopolitan” encompasses William Burroughs, a drug addled, Beat-Generation wife killer, whose “work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful.” … Madonna Reason has exalted for, as they put it, leading “MTV’s glorious parade of freaks, gender-benders, and weirdos who helped broaden the palette of acceptable cultural identities and destroy whatever vestiges of repressive mainstream sensibilities still remained.” That sounds like the unscrambled, strange dialect spoken by a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. [Or is it “Wimmin’s Studies”?]

Much as the Left does, libertarians-lite divine, in the country’s founding documents, all kinds of exhortations to let it all hang out. Similar kitsch and clichés were solicited from historian Thaddeus Russell on “Stossel,” earlier this year. Russel’s banal history-from-below has it that we owe our freedoms less to the Founders’ political philosophy, than to the “saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, to antiheroes such as drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, madams who owned land and used guns, and provided cutting-edge of fashion, … criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.” (HERE. )

To listen to this particular “Stossel” guest, the unions, and not the Hebrews, gave us the Sabbath.

(Actually, the Founders had quite the affinity for the Hebrew Bible. Some of them even spoke Hebrew—a feat that would have required a lot of that Puritanical discipline dissed by Russell as regressive and oppressive, during the Stossel segment. The American Founding Father would not have needed “drunken workers” to teach them about the spiritual and ethical significance of a Sabbath.)

Naturally, I’m down with any lifestyle the individual chooses, just so long as he or she doesn’t visit violence on others, as the Transportation Security Administration does daily. But the typical life-style libertarian is a lot more laid back than the hardcore libertarian about government goons who’re engaged in legalized crime.

Take Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie, lightweight libertarian in-residence on “Stossel” and on “Freedom Watch.” Gillespie wasn’t that worked-up about the War on Terror or the TSA during his umpteenth appearance on Fox Business’ Stossel. This hipster had less-than harsh words about the TSA, protesting only that a well-intentioned effort had gone terribly wrong. Gillespie, who is at his most passionate when discussing life-style laissez-faire, also seconded the general impetus of the War on Terror, if not its more diabolical aspects.

Here serious libertarians get worked up. The War on Terror is a ruse that greases the skids for unconstitutional state expansion. As for the homegrown terrorists of the TSA: each and every one ought to be jailed for every assault perpetrated, their department dismantled.

More material: Liberty loving adults are left cold by fast-talking juveniles (old and young), wearing trendy eye-wear, who insist that the cultural foot-and-mouth that is “Glee” and Gaga is the very essence of American freedoms. Grown-up Americans get that to conflate low-culture with American liberties is absolutely asinine. (And very much the embodiment of life-style libertarianism.)

As the libertarian law goes, all human beings have the freedom to act-out in any way they like, so long as they abstain from aggressing against non-aggressors. Life, liberty and property: That’s the holy trinity of authentic libertarianism; the very essence of leave-me-alone, negative, American liberties. The rest is either fluff or ancillary; libertinism is subsumed within a larger, more-inclusive category of liberty.

Ordinary, gun-toting, homeschooling, bible-thumping Middle Americans remain unmoved by people who draw their paycheques from foundations, think tanks, and academia, and wax orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman. This stuff might appear sophisticated, but it is reductive and shallow—a post-graduate cleverness that lacks philosophical depth.If you’ve read this column with any consistency, you know that it doesn’t object to risqué expression; only to artistically worthless cultural products. Joining the Idiocracy, in my opinion, is never liberating, and things that addle the brain permanently are, ultimately, not liberating. Still, I can see how libertinism can be freeing in many ways.

Blasé libertarianism certainly has crossover appeal—it plays well with silly sorts both at the Daily Beast and at Fox Business. This fare, however, is unlikely to catch-on in real America.

Personally, I believe in the paramountcy of privacy. If “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, then sexual exhibitionism – homosexual, heterosexual, gender-bender, and other – is anathema.

The heroic and creative inner struggle is what brings out the best in man. My heroes are in the Greek tradition: Silent, stoic, principled yet private; the American Founders, not life-style libertarianism’s philanderers.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
July 8