digamma.net - notes

If you want examples of how 9/11 drove a lot of then-libertarians insane, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to be had by reading Neal Boortz’s archives from then and now.

October 13, 1999:

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbids federal troops from participating in domestic law enforcement activities, but new measures supported by the Clinton administration and approved in July allow the Department of Defense to deploy troops in cases of actual or anticipated terrorist attacks. Eager to downplay the inevitable concerns about troops operating on U.S. soil, Defense Secretary William Cohen said, “The American people should not be concerned about it. They should welcome it.”

Welcome it? That’s good–keep painting the new unit as something that will bring Americans more security on home soil. After all, there’s ample evidence that increasing numbers of Americans are all too willing to give up their individual freedoms to get a little more security. But do we want to see more incidents like Waco? Members of the Army’s Delta Force were deployed there. Marines assisting in border patrols shot and killed a goatherder in Texas in 1997. These things will happen with frightening regularity as the Posse Comitatus Act’s restrictions are eroded further.

July 6, 2005:

The Pentagon is reportedly training soldiers for civil defense and promoting a relaxation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Probably not a bad idea…we’re a sitting duck for another terrorist strike.

If any Cato Institute employee had to be tarred in a payola scandal, I would have preferred nearly anyone but Doug Bandow.

Naturally the left is happy to see someone from the pro-corporate Cato Institute shown up as corrupt. But I think if a lot of them took a minute to read some of his writings, they’d find very little to disagree with. Most of Bandow’s writings were advocating a sensible foreign policy based, first and foremost, on peace. Yes, dirty hippy pot-smoking bra-burning peace. That thing Democrats like but aren’t supposed to talk about.

And so we get responses like this (approvingly linked by Eschaton) :

And this brings into question which other of his opinions might have been for sale. Was he for instance paid by the Serbian government or its American friends for his advocacy against NATO intervention in the Balkans? These columns really stand out for their pro Serb line in extremis. Is he on their payroll too?

Oy.

You know, there was another US intervention Bandow opposed recently. I guess he was on the payroll of Saddam Hussein too. At last, Laura Rozen and Glenn Reynolds agree on something - when you oppose my party’s war, you’re on the other side.

Matt Yglesias nails the problem with Clintonian triangulation:

An egregious pander here-or-there on some symbolic culture war issue is a perfectly reasonable political strategy for an ambitious figure to implement, and while liberals ought to complain a little (it doesn’t actually work as a strategy unless someone whines about it), it’s not the biggest deal in the world. But all this repositioning is in pursuit of . . . what, exactly?

The goal ought to be some sort of grand bargain where you tilt right on some stuff but also promise some substantial liberal advances. If Senator Clinton is just so hobbled by her high negatives that she needs to cut a political profile that consists of nothing but efforts to reach out to the center, then who needs her? A would-be Democratic president ought to be associated with some big progressive cause, but the only time you see Clinton in the news is for some dash to the right.

Yglesias is talking about Mrs. Clinton, but that was my problem with Mr. Clinton throughout the 1990’s. When I wore my Nader buttons in 1996 and 2000, Democrats would explain to me that Clinton HAD to execute the retarded kid, double the prison population, slash welfare to bits, and censor the Internet - because otherwise he couldn’t get elected!

But, if you’re not a blind partisan, getting elected isn’t an end - it’s the means to an end. That end is good policy. When you triangulate, you need to think hard about whether the ends justify the means.