A word to Libertarians
Posted By Russ Emerson on November 2, 2012 at 6:27 pm
It’s not often that I quote myself (OK, who am I kidding, I do it all the time — just, not here… much) but in reply to a “concern troll” Libertarian commenter at Legal Insurrection I fired an off-the-cuff missive that after due consideration seems to me to be too on-point to get buried.
After reading such gems as “Romney is just another fascist” and “You guys are fighting over who gets to rape you” and noting his support for Gary Johnson, I wrote back:
Go ahead, stand on your pedestal, beat your chest, loudly proclaim you are a man of principle, and toss off your vote for Johnson.
MY principle includes the certain knowledge that either Romney or Obama will be taking the oath of office on January 20th next year (I assume Johnson will be off somewhere getting high) and it had better not be Obama.
Hell no, Romney’s not perfect, but when you make the perfect the enemy of the good (or even of the “less bad”) you are in fact casting your vote for the worst.
Politics is about moving in a direction. Sure, I’d prefer more movement away from statism than Romney might deliver, but he is, at the minimum, some movement in the right direction.
So go ahead and wear your self-proclaimed moral superiority like a halo. It will be of enormous comfort to you if Obama wins a second term and drags us further and irremediably into the pit of statism.
When your children and grandchildren ask what happened to the free America they read about, and ask what you did about it, you can be proud that you pontificated and backed a sure loser.
Because of your principles.
I once again would direct everyone to the wisdom of Bill Whittle:
Vote like your liberties are at stake — they are.
[…] Thus Spake Russ has a word for Libertarians […]