Analytics

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Post #5871: Rant of the Day: The Tweet From Hell

 The Libertarian Party has had more than its fair share of colorful characters and weird moments that are embarrassing for the rest of us. The following moment from the 2016 convention, the year I switched from being a nominally registered Republican, unhappy that Trump had clinched the nomination. One of the candidates for a party leadership position had decided to strip on stage, and it wasn't a pretty sight.

 Now before getting into the politics of non-interventionism, let us recall the infamous feud between Trump and McCain. It seems to have started when Trump and McCain ran campaigns for POTUS, Trump for Perot's Reform Party, a short-lived unsuccessful effort. Trump attacked McCain's Vietnam experience, arguing that being captured as a POW was nothing to be proud of. (Trump, of course, never served in Vietnam, having obtained deferments.) McCain. who had co-led bipartisan immigration reform, particularly during Bush's and Obama's second terms, took exception to Trump'a inflammatory rhetoric about Mexico dumping violent criminals across the border. There were other incidents, like Trump's slam of the late husband of a war widow at the Democratic convention and Trump's sexist language about treating women. McCain also threw a monkey wrench in Trump's ObamaCare repeal and replace priority. It had become so contentious that Trump was explicitly excluded from McCain's funeral. (McCain died from brain cancer.)

There has been, in my view, a perverse sympathy for Trump from libertarians, which I've referenced in multiple occasions in past posts. I think part of this of this has to do with antipathy of leftism, particularly embedded in the government, the so-called Deep State, the entrenched unaccountable bureaucracy, e.g., the whole Russiagate investigation. There are still libertarians who buy into Trump's first impeachment defense, that his extortion of Zelensky was really aimed at getting Ukraine to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the Biden's, who targeted the (corrupt) Ukraine prosecutor for investigating him. [I've written multiple posts on this. I'll point out the target of the investigation in question was the oligarch owner of Burisma, not Hunter; Shokin (the prosecutor) had cleared the oligarch of a British money laundering charge; and other parties (the IMF and EU, not to mention anti-corruption locals) had sought Shokin's termination.] A lot of libertarians were obsessed by the leaker of the incriminating "perfect phone call", who they considered to be an internal saboteur against an elected Presidency. 

More recently, many libertarians (e.g., Napolitano here) saw the recent FBI search at Mar-a-Lago as a violation of Trump's fourth amendment rights. Not to mention there is a history of alleged FBI bloody interventions thought to violate civil liberties.

But for me, the most contentious part of libertarian empathy has to be with Trump's purported America First policy which they have tried to link to their non-interventionist policies. If not for the entrenched neo-conservative interventionists, Trump would have restored us to our neo-isolationist roots. This is a fantasy on so many levels: Trump was pushing for record DoD budgets; he outbombed Obama in Afghanistan; he shot missiles into Syria, assassinated an Iranian government official, tried to suppress information on civilian casualties, hired neo-cons as National Security Adviser and Pentagon chief, etc. He didn't want to scrap NATO, just get rid of the "freeloaders". 

Now the above tweet doesn't reference the McCain/Trump feud, but for less familiar reader. August 25 was the fourth anniversary of McCain's death. The NH LP is indirectly referencing casualties of America's wars during McCain's political tenure, scapegoating him, and effectively dancing on his grave. Exploiting daughter Meghan McCain's grief is unusually cruel and unnecessary. I myself have been critical of Bush and McCain's interventionist advocacy, but there are better ways of making the point. For example, I would point out that fathers on both sides of our wars have been lost, leaving behind grieving family members, just like Meghan. 

It went beyond this tweet, of course; Scott Horton (who I've sometimes clipped over the life of the blog) more explicitly pointed out America's interventions during McCain's tenure, but I personally consider any attempt to defend the evil tweet as itself evil.

Finally, while writing this essay, the LP wrote a tweet on a similar theme, not referencing McCain this time, but terming our policy as "mass murder".  I rebuked the tweet as presented below, and my reply tweet went "viral" (as I write, over 7300 impressions). The LP Mises Caucus snapped back at me, not unexpected. Maybe I'll respond in a follow-up post.

 

Posted by at