If that corrective mechanism were working, the Left would have been finished before I was born.

Count on the Left — who still retain control over the culture’s basic epistemology — to dodge that bullet the same way they have so many times before — using the following methods:

1. Adjust concepts so that the disaster in question was someone else’s fault, i.e. the “right wing”. This is how the Left shed eugenics and the National Socialists in one fell swoop — they simply redefined racism as “right wing”.

2. Corrupt the common terms of thought to permit re-evaluation of the event as a “well-meant” effort that went wrong due to unrelated causes (“Communism is good/noble in theory, the implementations were just bad”). Also known as “re-framing”.

Opposition to welfare and warfare is libertarianism, period. Government means welfare, and welfare leads to warfare. To take a notorious example, Germany was the first modern welfare state, the welfare state bankrupted the country, and it led to warfare both against their neighbors and against their own people. And it works the other way, as in Britain where the government obligingly went along with Germany’s wars, and used the warfare as the excuse to institute domestic welfare. The USA is using warfare in an attempt to impose socialist welfare states on middle eastern countries, while simultaneously building a larger welfare state at home, and are now starting to deploy troops domestically in order to ensure compliance with welfare policies. The official response to hurricane Katrina is an outstanding example of massive welfare spending accompanied by a massive show of force. Welfare leads to warfare and vice-versa.

Libertarianism is opposed to statism, because statism means welfare/warfare and nothing else. I don’t know what you think libertarians are “wrong” about, but possibly you have not thought this through yet and connected all the dots.

{shrug} Dunno. James Taranto was gettin’ busy with it.

Whether or not Obama was mentored by Davis, my point is that Obama is not a communist, but a welfare state politician. As Bush and many others have shown, just being a welfare state politician is bad enough.

Dismuke, egad.

C.T., Ayn Rand’s book on ethics is called “The Virtue of Selfishness.” It’s too much of a coincidence to think Obama doesn’t know about it.

Or has anyone seen evidence to support the notion that he was in fact referring to Rand in a backhanded fashion?

This seems like a mighty fine moment for some profanity.

Gee – does this mean that you weren’t in Florida when Janet Reno was running for governor?

A disinformation campaign, spearheaded by Cliff Kincaid’s “Accuracy In Media” (AIM), exaggerates Davis’s radical influence on teenage Obama. The Obama campaign specifically refuted this fraudulent meme, which deliberately misrepresents the relationship as “almost like a son.” A painstakenly documented analysis of this disinformation campaign is posted as “specific misrepresentation” at http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gGxdvX .

While watching the Miami Dolphins play in Kansas City on Sunday, where the mercury was at 10 degrees on the field, a fan in the stands held a sign that read: “Al Gore–Global Warming???”

That’s a good sign, in more ways than one.

This probably deserves a post of its own. Its true that the libertarians and Paleo-Cons make the welfare-warfare argument. But ultimately they are only right superficially. The libertarians hate the state and are pacifists. The Paleo-Cons are really watered down versions of white Christian nationalists who want to turn America into a sealed fortress of white Euro-stock Christianity. They each do not object to Bush’s foreign policy for rational reasons.

But putting that aside, I like your list and think your analysis is excellent as always.