Welch tries to outdo Sullivan

Matt Welch, master of the misleading anti-McCain diatribe, is now complaining that McCain went

from saying that "Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality" (2003), to saying that a McCain administration would focus on "creating new markets for farmers by providing incentives to create low carbon auto fuels like ethanol" (2007).

But McCain was consistent in his opposition to ethanol subsidies. Here's a report from December 2007, shortly before the Iowa caucus:

The presidential candidate voiced his opposition to ethanol subsidies during a recent speech before an energy group in Virginia and during a debate this week in Des Moines, Iowa....

McCain has said he supports creating a market environment to encourage production of ethanol and other alternative fuels, but not government subsidies.

And McCain was no less clear in his opposition to ethanol subsidies last month.

Welch also complains that McCain wrote "God has given us...life, shown us how to use it, but left it to us to dispose of as we choose," and later wrote the following about Charles Darwin: "It is hard for me to appreciate the history he made without seeing in its accomplishment the hand of providence....God is not indifferent to our suffering nor has He left us bereft of hope." How these sentiments are supposed to be contradictory is left unexplained. And I don't see how either contradict McCain's characterization of Paul Weyrich as "a pompous, self-serving son of a bitch."

Who benefits most from Welch's ill-informed, ill-considered rants? It's not Reason's readers.

McCain upsides

I've long been critical of Matt Welch for making what I've considered a one-sided case against McCain. Now he's offering "potential upsides" for libertarians in a McCain presidency. Welch deserves credit for looking at the other side of an argument, an uncommon practice in punditry.

I think, however, that the case is yet stronger than Welch's 7 points-with-caveats would suggest. For one thing, McCain and Bush have not "believed the same thing" about entitlements; McCain, unlike the Libertarian presidential candidate, voted against Bush's Medicare expansion into drug coverage.

Moreover, McCain has been an opponent (if not with perfect rhetorical consistency) of agricultural and ethanol subsidies, has taken a generally secular tone on matters of government and religion, favors competition in education, plausibly will put limited-government types on the Supreme Court, and has a healthy suspicion of international bureaucracy. Plus, as I've noted elsewhere, McCain's rhetoric has an underreported individualist streak.

Still, I think Welch makes a lot of good points in his post.

McCain time travel

Matt Welch dismisses McCain newspaper endorsements for "errors of fact" in the same paragraph where Welch writes about McCain:

In the 1970s, he took R&R — the rest and recuperation allowed by the military for wartime soldiers — with legendary New York Times scribe R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr. before he got shot down over Vietnam.

Question for L.A. Times fact checkers: In what decade was McCain shot down over Vietnam?

UPDATE: Guess I could do better checking my own facts. Welch's piece is in L.A. Weekly, not L.A. Times.

Welch on McCain

Matt Welch on John McCain in today's New York Times:

In “Worth the Fighting For,” he wrote that “our greatness depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions.” These institutions, Mr. McCain wrote, should “fortify the public’s allegiance to the national community.”

...all of his actions can be seen as an attempt to use the federal government to restore your faith in ... the federal government. Once we all put our shoulder on the same wheel, there’s nothing this country can’t do.

It can be a bracing approach when his issues line up with yours — I, for one, would welcome President McCain’s unilateral wars on pork-barrel spending and waterboarding — but it’s treacherous territory for those of us who consider “the pursuit of happiness” as something best defined by individuals, not crusading presidents-to-be.

I'm not a fan of McCain's campaign finance "reform" or push against Ultimate Fighting, so I agree with a number of Welch's points. But McCain's emphasis on making the federal government more disciplined and accountable should be a pretty big positive for libertarians. And a sense of "allegiance to the national community" is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it's questionable how long an individualistic society would survive without any such allegiance.

Welch on Frum

Matt Welch on David Frum:

Republicans should cave on new spending and regulations, says Frum, in exchange for tax cuts.

I'm traveling right now, and I don't have my copy of Comeback on hand. But I read it closely and reviewed it here. And Welch's statement is wrong. First, Frum is highly critical of the Bush administration's spending. Second, Frum wants such competition-enhancing regulatory reforms as the lifting of state rules that prevent people from buying health insurance across state lines. Third, Frum wants Republicans to stop emphasizing tax cuts, and to embrace a carbon tax.

I understand the exigencies of magazine product differentiation. But if you're going to crusade against neocons, at least know what you're talking about.

Anti-McCain ignorance

After calling John McCain a “liberal fascist,” John Tabin at The American Spectator adds this parenthetical:

(Possible good news: McCain has praised free markets in the course of this campaign -- for the first time in his political career, according to McCain biographer Matt Welch.)

I don’t know if this grotesquely erroneous characterization accurately reflects anything in Welch’s book, which I haven’t read, and therefore can’t say if Tabin’s abysmal ignorance is proprietary or secondhand. As for free markets, McCain has not only praised but voted for them many times, as this long-term evaluation at the Cato Institute’s “Free Markets, Free Trade: Rating the Congress” site attests.

And here, by the way, is McCain praising the "core value" that is "free markets" in a 1999 speech.

Fit for polite company

David Frum explains much of what's wrong with today's anti-intellectual conservatism. Excerpt:

I don’t think of myself as having gone squishy. I think of myself as having grown sober. And my conservative critics? On them, I think the most apt verdict was delivered by Niccolo Macchiavelli, 500 years ago: “This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not.”

Meanwhile, Tunku Varadarajan denounces Frum as a "polite-company conservative" and makes the case for heavy mouth-breathing:

Passionate "extremism" is part of any political debate, and the more of it the better.

Really, Varadarajan? The more extremism the better?

UPDATE 3/25: The American Enterprise Institute has now made a powerful statement supporting Frum's critique of conservative narrowmindedness -- by firing him.

Update 3/25 #2: Matt Welch weighs in on Frum. It's a subject Welch has not been very well-informed about in the past.

Libertarian piety watch

One reason libertarianism isn't more influential is the sheer smugness with which it's so often presented. Here's Matt Welch showing some self-satisfaction:

What I do care about, regardless of who's president, is human freedom and prosperity. And I strongly and consistently suspect that when the government accumulates more power, I and everyone else (except those wielding it) have less of which I seek. Republicans diss libertarians when they're in power, and Democrats diss libertarians when they're in power. Their changing attitudes toward our little (albeit growing) tribe is mildly interesting, but it's about as newsworthy (and painful) as a dog biting a chew toy.

Yes, "human freedom and prosperity" -- how admirable to care about those things. And when Welch says government power means "less of which I seek," what is he even talking about? Power? Or freedom and prosperity? Or is the sentence so noble it doesn't have to make sense?

UPDATE 2/15: A positive plug from a prime practitioner of pompous presumption.

Not such an iceman

Virginia Postrel, whom I'm glad to see back blogging, points to Jonathan Chait's New Republic article on McCain's supposedly iceman-like political calculations. It has some interesting material, but I find more compelling the first comment, by one Derannimer:

How was the big leftward shift after 2000 supposed to be politically advantageous? I mean, say you're John McCain, and you just got crushed in SC et al for not being conservative enough, and you want to run for president again. It seems to me that either you deliberately plan to switch over to the Dems, and then actually do it, or you put your head down and spend the next 4-8 years becoming the most reliable conservative in the Senate. What you don't do is tack wildly to the left for the first couple years, thereby pissing off everyone in your party, but simultaneously refuse to actually make the switch to Dem, thereby preventing your new positions from doing you any real good; and then spend the next several years tacking wildly back to the right. As you observe, it's his positions right after 2000 that are causing him so much grief now. If he's a coldly cunning strategist, he's not actually very good at it. Besides which, it's not just that he does things which tick off the party, and might benefit him politically; he also does things which tick off locals, and don't seem to benefit him at all. What was the grand thought behind opposing the disaster-fund-whatever-thingy in FL? He dang near lost FL. What was the thought behind telling the Michiganners they weren't getting their jobs back? He did lose MI. If you ask me, Matt Yglesias' characterisation of McCain as 'flighty', or Matt Welch's discussion of McCain's quasi-religious hyper-nationalism (Welch has a great interview on bloggingheads) are both more convincing than the calculating Iceman hypothesis.

As I said in my original "endorsement," McCain has some big-government tendencies I dislike. I also think he's by far the best bet for limiting government among any of the people who were or are running this year.

UPDATE: And yes, I do include in the above "any of the people" the ridiculous Ron Paul, whose spending plans were only 5 percent lower than McCain's, and whose views on immigration and social issues had little to do with limiting government.

Varied & misc.

Some items I found interesting, in no particular order:

Notices and remembrances of recently deceased Reason magazine founder Lanny Friedlander by Nick Gillespie and Bob Poole. Justin Raimondo conscripts Friedlander as antiwar pioneer, doesn't mention his Navy service.

Review copy received: The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch.

Review copy received: First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, by Marc Kaufman.

Review copy not requested (though I'm tempted): Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore, by Benjamin Radford.

"Creationism Makes a Comeback," by Noah Kristula-Green at FrumForum.

Selective memory

Matt Welch:

As Reason repeatedly pointed out in 2008, both Obama and the Democrats writ large came to the cusp of reclaiming Washington by rejecting '90s-style "New Democrat" economic Clintonism. And Obama's double-talk at this point should be no surprise.

As I recall, the burning questions at Reason last year were whether to vote for Obama or Bob Barr or nobody (because voting is bad), how to tout someone's anti-McCain book, and how to distance the magazine from post-newsletter scandal Ron Paul without losing its Pauliac readers.

"Individual liberty and the free market are paramount"

Matt Welch, pursuing John McCain like an avenging Krampus, quotes the senator's own maniacal words. I believe it's the same speech about being "ready on day one to be Commander-in-Chief of our economy"--oh sorry that was someone else. Here, however, is a passage from a 2007 McCain speech:

"Property," John Adams wrote, "is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty." Yet today property rights come under attack from regulations that affect every conceivable aspect of property ownership. Mr. Adams would be shocked to learn what both the United States Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Connecticut did to Susette Kelo, an American homeowner, in allowing the government to seize her home for economic development and gain under the guise of "valid public use."

The protection of property rights lies at the heart of our constitutional system. The Framers of our Constitution drew upon classical notions of legal rights and individual liberty dating back to the Justinian Code, the Magna Carta, and the Two Treatises of John Locke, all of which recognize the importance of property ownership in a governmental system in which individual liberty and the free market are paramount.

Then again, I guess if you're libertarian enough, the John Adams citation is damning, too.

Specter departing

To those who want to see the GOP expand and not contract, this should come as unwelcome news.

UPDATE: A predictable barrage of who-needs-him purism begins.

UPDATE2: Quiz question: What 1996 Republican candidate quoted Barry Goldwater's credo of keeping government "out of our pockets, off our backs and out of our bedrooms"? I'm not saying the candidate in question admirably lived up to that credo, but (memo to Matt Welch) Specter's departure isn't entirely a good thing if you'd like to see a GOP with more libertarian instincts.

UPDATE3: David Frum sums it up well: "Let’s take this moment to nail some colors to the mast. I submit it is better for conservatives to have 60% sway within a majority party than to have 100% control of a minority party. And until and unless there is an honored place made in the Republican party for people who think like Arlen Specter, we will remain a minority party."

UPDATE4: "RED TIL I'M DEAD BABY!!!"

UPDATE5: Specter offers a useful reminder of his opportunistic schmuckiness.

Anti-McCain overkill

Over at Reason, Matt Welch is now explaining that John McCain took no political risks in supporting the surge in 2007 as he headed into the Republican primaries:

Second and more interestingly, at the time of the surge, there was zero political cost to McCain supporting the surge. He was running in a Republican primary, and not particularly well, so his ironclad support for troop escalation was largely seen by many Republican stalwarts (in a season where the only anti-war candidate was being treated like a leper) as one of the best things going for the guy, given his various transgressions on other counts.

Here's a report on some polling from June 2007, as the surge troops moved in:

Thirty percent of Americans polled say they favor the war, the lowest level of support on record. Two-thirds are opposed.

Anti-war sentiment among Republican poll respondents has suddenly increased with 38 percent of Republicans now saying they oppose the war.

Moreover, 63 percent of Americans are ready to withdraw at least some troops from Iraq. Forty-two percent of Republicans agree.

Forty-two percent of Republicans were ready to withdraw some troops, which would suggest less than overwhelming support in the party for putting more troops in. And the trend at that time was toward more opposition. Not exactly zero political risk, it seems to me.

More on Reason here.

Big-government conservatism?

I stipulate that it is wrong and thoughtless to regard George W. Bush and/or John McCain as exemplars of free-market, limited-government philosophy. But it's also wrong and thoughtless to regard them as completely antithetical to such principles. It's particularly wrong with regard to John McCain, foe of subsidies, earmarks, Medicare expansion and trade barriers. And the Bush administration, for all its big spending and unbalanced view of executive power, is recognizable in the following passage, even if the last line makes Matt Welch gag on his coffee:

So they advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast." President Bush has followed this playbook more closely than any previous president, including Reagan[.]

The Bush administration has followed the agenda pretty much as described, sometimes without much success (eg, health savings accounts, Social Security) and in some cases getting it done but for the worse (the shifting of many military functions to private security contractors is a worrisome trend). Note that the Reagan administration made far less effort, if any, toward Social Security privatization or health savings accounts. The Bush administration has been a debacle in many ways, but it's not simply or entirely a story of big-government conservatism failing.

Some quick political notes

1. A lot of traffic (by this blog's standards) is going into my old post "Gingrich Park Place Disgrace." Don't know if this reflects people actually reading that post, or some horde of robots or something. I sure haven't had the impression that particular controversy is going to make any kind of comeback.

2. I expressed skepticism the other day about Elizabeth Warren's presidential prospects, in line with my piece about her from last year. On the other hand, she does seem to have gotten Larry Summers' scalp just now. Still, like David Frum, I'd hesitate to sell any Hillary Clinton stock currently.

3. Kudos to Nick Gillespie for his article "Four Principles for a Libertarian National Security State." I'm sure a Gillespie national security policy would have differences from a Silber national security policy (and for some broader differences, see my FrumForum review of his and Matt Welch's book) but I don't see much to disagree with in this latest piece, including "target the bad guys."

The feds vs Reason

I've written for Reason magazine, and had my disagreements with Reason magazine. I retain considerable sympathy for the magazine's philosophy, but even if I didn't, I would be appalled by the federal government's actions in response to some obnoxious comments by readers at the magazine's website. Read the story by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: "How Government Stifled Reason's Free Speech."

Comeback, Frum and me

It's time to add one more to my list of 10+ most influential books:



I reviewed the book for the New York Post and later defended it against Matt Welch's knowledge-free criticism. I also got in touch with Frum and when he started FrumForum I went on to write a number of articles there; I hope to write more for that site in the future.

Comeback didn't influence me so much by changing my mind with its policy prescriptions. I was impressed by many of Frum's proposals and disliked a few (e.g., a "war on obesity"), but had a lot of common ground politically with Frum before I read the book. No, what was influential was the growing recognition (sparked by the book, increasing thereafter) that Frum's emphasis on rethinking policy -- or indeed thinking about it at all -- made him more and more an exception on the right; that instead, ideological orthodoxy, infotainment values and paranoid hysteria were pervasive and that these tendencies were manifest in both conservative and libertarian circles.

Frum's forced resignation has convinced me the sclerosis of the right is even worse than I thought. It's a condition that will be hard to cure, if that can be done at all.

UPDATE: Frum's post: "So What Happened?"

UPDATE 3/27: Tunku Varadarajan reiterates the amazing theory that the reason for Frum's termination was "goldbricking," i.e. he wasn't doing much work there so why pay him? I highly doubt that, given (a) the timing, coming right on the heels of Frum's controversial "Waterloo" piece and the WSJ's denunciation of him, and (b) one would think AEI would've asked him to do more work, if that was the issue, rather than firing him, especially in that (c) he was one of the best-known people they had. But if the "goldbricking" theory is true, then AEI is guilty not of ideological orthodoxy but of something even worse: stupidity. Did they not notice the timing and how Frum's termination would be perceived? As John Aloysius Farrell puts it:

If AEI was not punishing Frum for his apostasy, then its timing was at the very least awful, and the episode handled with a clumsiness that Larry, Moe, and Curly would admire.

UPDATE 3/28: Also see John R. Guardiano on "David Frum vs. the Right's Company Men."

Forget about the weather

I'm sure there's a libertarian case to be made for eliminating or privatizing all functions of the Commerce Department. Such a case would include discussion of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department, and would analyze how NOAA's network of weather satellites, ships and planes could be operated on a private basis; to be really compelling, the argument would recognize that there have been partial efforts in that direction over the years, and would draw upon that history in seeking to chart a future course.

Or, one could just write something like this glib Matt Welch post, which shows no awareness of any of the above other than dismissing a Department web page about the weather as "marginalia." After all, you can get weather reports from lots of other websites, right? (But where do they get the data?)

Drone news

Matt Welch: "A reminder to most Democrats who spent 2002-08 telling us that abuse of executive power was at or near the top of the nation's most urgent moral concerns: You just didn't mean it."