The Final Form of the Neocon Is Leftist: Liz Cheney Adopts the Left's Deplatforming Language to Pressure Fox to Stop Providing a "Platform" to Tucker Carlson

 The neocons are coming home again to the left-liberalism they strayed from 40 years ago.

A hallmark of the left's jihad against free speech is the claim that to even permit speech is to endorse that speech.

It's not enough to say, "I disagree with racism."

No, you have to define yourself fundamentally as a "committed anti-racism activist."

And it doesn't stop there. You're not allowed to even permit a BadSpeaker to speak. To permit him to speak is to be Complicity In Crime, to be an accessory to Word Murder.

Thus, the deplatforming craze on the left. No one can even speak at colleges except for those approved by the most leftwing of the leftwing vanguard of college student radicals.

...

 If you're a "libertarian" only as regards the kinds of sex the left wants to have and the kind of propaganda it wishes to instill in children at government schools, but then endorse bloody authoritarianism when it comes to enforcing the left's ever-growing list of blasphemies and heresies, guess what, you're not a libertarian, and certainly not a "conservatarian."

There's a more accurate term who supports license for all the thing the left likes to do, and repression of all the things the left doesn't like to do: that term is "leftist."

Not "libertarian." Not "conservatarian."

Just "leftist," same as the people at Salon and The Nation and New Republic.

So stop calling yourselves "libertarians" and "conservatarians."

You're just sexual-libertine leftists that approve of Drag Queen Story Hour and support the censorship of, and ultimately vigilante violence against, critics of Drag Queen Story Hour.

Read the whole thing. 

No.

Libertarians are the shits.

The Naked and the Right

One of the interesting aspects of the Trump Effect is how the members of Red Team, who used to lecture us about solidarity in the face of the Obama onslaught, are now stabbing their teammates in the back. Trump people are “trumpkins” and in a cult of personality. They declare that Trump is not a conservative as if that makes him a pagan who likes human sacrifice.

Read the comments of any Trump story and you inevitably see a group of mouth breathers railing about Trump not being a conservative. The word “conservative” has meant whatever the party bosses want for so long, most people can’t remember what it used to mean. It has become an abracadabra word that means “good” or “bad” depending upon the person using it.

[referring to a blogger who denounces Trump for wanting Apple to produce it's products in this country]

I’m unfamiliar with the blogger and I’m sure he is a peach of a fellow, but like many people, he seems to confuse libertarian with conservative. He’s also confused about what conservatism says about capitalism and markets. That’s a common failing among the politically active. It turns his comments about tribalism into a bit of self-parody, but maybe it is intentional in order to generate comments.

The confusion over free markets versus capitalism should be blamed on libertarians, who find it comforting to confuse the two. Free markets are an academic concept. They have never existed on earth. There are always external forces at work on the market participants. It turns out that humans have this thing called culture and culture shapes the market place by placing rules on the participants, either formally or informally.

Capitalism simply means private ownership of the means of production for the purpose of producing private profit. Put another way, it is the appropriation of capital (property, money, labor, etc.) by some to the exclusion of others. Just as there are no completely free market economies, no modern state is purely capitalist. There is always some degree of public ownership.

The point here is that you can have capitalism with all sorts of government interventions and you can have a market economy with loads of state regulation. What defines the Right is not whether there is a debate over these issues. The Right is defined by who decides and how. It is libertarians who argue that issues like trade and regulation are beyond the pale and can never be debated.

...

To some degree it is understandable that people like that blogger would think it is all about economics. Again, this is the libertarian poison that has oozed into the bloodstream of the Right. Since the Republicans are afraid to discuss culture, they have retreated into synthetic debates over free markets and free trade. You never have to worry about the Left calling you names if you are on the side of Apple, even if Apple is using slaves to make their products.

That I suspect is why so many are so vexed by Donald Trump. His campaign is forcing a debate about what it means to be a conservative. This is bad for the technocrats and the libertarians. Both camps operate from the assumption that culture is meaningless and can be plowed under in the quest for power, material goods or economic efficiency. It’s also a handy way of steering clear of the social justice warriors.

... We’re suddenly finding out who is and who is not on the Right. The libertarians are swimming back to their island and the technocrats are waddling back over to the Left.

Some thoughts on the sexual assault issue on campus

There has been quite a reaction on the Libertarian Right about universities crusading against “sexual assault,” often defined as women complaining about having sex while drunk, regretting having sex, or simply lying about it. The most egregious example in the last decade is the Duke Lacrosse case in which the members of the lacrosse team were accused of gang-raping a stripper they had hired for a party. It turns out the accusation was lie, but in the meantime the Duke faculty signed petitions, held marches and banged on pans to protest the rape that never happened. The case drew national headlines. Virtually all of the MSM assumed the white men were guilty of raping the black woman, and that this was a perfect example of White Male Privilege™.

The accused men were in danger of being jailed for many years until their legal team was able to prove that the accusation by the stripper was a lie.  

Forget for a moment that a number of innocent young men almost spent decades in jail because a woman lied and Liberals tried to lynch them because they were young, white, rich jocks.  Do you think hiring strippers is a good idea?  What do you think about a young woman who decides to be a stripper who sidelines as a prostitute and makes that her career choice?  Is she sexually liberated?   A young woman whose claim to fame is acting in porn films has just become a student at Duke, explaining that performing in porn is "liberating."

Even as the tide of sexual self-expression is cresting, we have a counter-revolution.  The interesting thing is that this is a counter-revolution led by the revolutionaries.  The current hysteria about college as a hotbed of rape is fanned by Liberals and feminists.  But it's not certain whether it's created by actual feminist hysteria or by Democrats trying to rouse their base.  This may be a false choice; it's probably both.

Glenn Reynolds, the Master of the Universe of blogging, frequently links to articles on this subject. I love his blog Instapundit and am very much in tune with most of his views. His view may be the most representative of the Libertarian position on this issue.  But we do differ. He’s a Libertarian and I’m a Conservative. Our experiences are different. For one thing, Glenn’s a lot younger. He often hints that in his student years he was quite the stud. He frequently links to The Frisky website which specializes in the multiple sexual adventures of young unmarried women …. sort of a Penthouse for college-age women without the pictures.

If I am to take Glenn Reynolds, Hollywood, TV shows, the print media – sort of the regnant pop culture – as representative of American culture as it’s lived and experienced, I am woefully out of date. But then I look around me at teens, young adults, the middle aged and elderly where I live in Middle America and I don’t see people living the lives as they are depicted in popular culture.  True, I'm not peering in bedroom windows.  But looking away from the screen and the tabloid I know that I am in the majority and they are in the minority.  They just have hold of the media megaphone.  Most marriages that I am aware of are monogamous. I know a few gay people but no married gays. It may be true that college is a place where sexual license reigns and young adults with raging hormones take the opportunity to do things that their parents would not allow them to do at home. But I would be troubled if I thought my children were busy putting notches on their bedposts in the evening rather than studying.

We are all victims of the culture.  A great, if extreme, example of the image that college students are supposed to emulate was Elliott Rodger. Of course Rodger was weird in so many ways, expecting women to approach him if he walked past. But his image of male/female relationships was very much in line with the way it’s depicted in film, the Internet and magazines. He wanted that lifestyle.  What young man at that age doesn’t dream of having the cheerleader throw herself at you. And women reading Cosmo, The Frisky, or similar outlets may feel there’s something wrong with her if she has not slept with at least a couple of her classmates.

But sex is not a value-neutral act. It’s not the same as scratching and itch or a game of tennis. But that’s how it’s often depicted, a sporting event that you have to practice so that you can get good. But "casual sex" is like playing with knives.  You will either receive or give others psychological scars. Those are the emotional consequences.  There are also physical ones like pregnancy and an array of “social” diseases some of which have no cures.

With that as the background, let’s think about what we should desire in terms of a better atmosphere for the teen and young adult going to college. At the risk of sounding like a prude – I remember my own raging hormones as a college student - I don’t know of any Conservative who thinks that the college “hook up” culture is a good thing. Tom Wolfe wrote a book (Hooking Up) and a novel (I am Charlotte Simmons) about this.   They are both good reads and leave you questioning the culture in academia.

Perhaps Conservatives should not reflexively oppose what the Left is doing to men in academia. We should, of course, seek to protect young men from being railroaded by a kangaroo court. But keep in mind that the reason these young men are being accused of sex crimes is because, in almost all cases, they have had sex with their accuser. So in standing up for them we are also standing up for casual sex, the one-night stand, the drunken quickie, in college. We are joining the ranks of the Libertines for whom the hook-up culture is a wonderful thing. I’m not sure that that’s a group I would like to join. Between the guy who will screw any girl if given half a chance and the girl who lets him, regrets it later and tries to ruin his life, it would be nice if they could both lose.

The Left has created the current debased standards of sexual conduct in academia. I am willing to see if the Left can be more reactive than the Bible thumping troglodyte of popular culture.  Let's see if they can fix the problem that they have created; because it is a problem.

Rather than stand up for the principle that casual sex on campus is a good thing, something that should be protected, let’s use some social jujitsu. Let’s see if we can go the Left one better. How about the end of co-ed dorms? Perhaps we can even encourage reports of drunken, unsatisfactory sex between unmarried students. Do we really want to be the ones who assault the ramparts of academia in favor of sexual promiscuity?

ObamaCare hits the barrier. What now?

 

You've seen the movies where they test cars for crashworthiness. 

 

ObamaCare is like one of those slow-motion wrecks you see when they test cars. 

 

The first thing to hit the barrier is the bumper:  that was the rollout of the non-functioning website. 

 

Then the hood begins to crumple:   think cancellation notices hitting mailboxes.

 

The windshield shatters:  sticker shock as the middle class figures out who's paying for the free-riders.  

 

Wait for the rest of the movie when those getting their insurance through their employers find out what's going to happen to them.

 

In a car crash this bad, repair is not an option.  This mess cannot simply be reversed.  To go back to the car analogy, there are too many things wrecked.  The status quo ante is gone.  

 

We do, however, have an opportunity to get a new car, one without the rattles and dings of the old one. 

 

This could be a golden opportunity for the Right joined by the Libertarians to come up with a new health care model; a model for the 21st century.  Where no one dies for lack of care but freedom and individual choice are front and center.  Where patient and doctor are not separated from each other by government or insurance companies.   Where comparison shopping is encouraged and overuse of medical services cost the abuser money.  Where tests are done for medical reasons rather than to create a paper trail to avoid lawsuits.  By ending, finally and forever, the lawyers-suing-doctors-to-get-rich industry, a Democrat (see John Edwards) specialty.

 

 The first step is to point out that Obama and the Left tried to sell us on the old and sclerotic European models that are now breaking down, leaving death in their wake.  They tried to sell us a used Yugo.

 

We actually have a great opportunity, and it's been handed to us by none other than Barack Obama if we have the vision to see it. 

Tony Macrini: House of Representatives should shut up and sit down.

 Morning drive time radio talk show host on WNIS, Tony Macrini, who vows he’s a Libertarian, was ranting at a caller this morning about the impasse between the Democrats and the Republicans.  He kept repeating the Democrats talking point that since Obama was re-elected, he gets his way no matter what.  If he wants to prevent the House from making any changes in ObamaCare, the House’s job is to salute smartly, ignore its role as specified in the Constitution, and obey. 

His solution was for Republicans to try to capture both houses of Congress and the Presidency and then they can make some changes.  Until then, according to “Libertarian” Macrini, the House must bow to the wishes of the Democrats in the Senate and the President.  If the Democrats put their foot down, the House is irrelevant in this government; their job is to rubber stamp what the Senate and the President wants.  Oh, and forget what their constituents sent them to Washington to do.

Now while I have the utmost respect for a high school graduate and a radio talker, that’s not the way the law of the land, the Constitution, says the government is supposed to function.  In fact, here’s something high school graduates used to know: congress has a duty to pass a budget every year.  That’s something that congress has not done for five years.  The term you hear bandied about “CR” stand for “continuing resolution” which is a short-had way of saying that we won’t do our job of working on a budget for the government but just put it on autopilot and let it do next year what it did last year.  And when did that start?  Well if you’re a high school graduate and can check back you’ll find that Harry Reid and the Democrats in the Senate started doing that five years ago.  So the US Government has been spending money without a budget for every year of the Obama presidency. 

You can always tell a Libertarian by his stand on principle, especially if he voted for Obama. 

Coulter versus Libertarianism

Patriotic Group To Build Armed 'Defensible' Neighborhood Fortress

The group, named Citadel, intends to purchase 2,000 to 3,000 acres for the project in western Idaho. The community will comprise of 3,500 to 7,000 families of patriotic Americans who "voluntarily choose to live together in accordance with Thomas Jefferson's ideal of Rightful Liberty."

According to the Citadel website, Rightful Liberty means that "neighbors keep their noses out of other neighbors' business, that neighbors live and let live."

We may be seeing the second American revolution.

How Reality-Based are Libertarians?

One Derek Lowe (the baseball player?  the blogging chemist?) e-mails Glenn Reynolds about the recent election, saying that

“I can’t picture myself voting for him [Obama]”

... but also putting down the other candidates who ran in the Republican primary.

He’s a self-described libertarian:

“I think America is a great country. But I’m not religious, and my political beliefs don’t rest on a religious foundation. Gay marriage (to pick one example) doesn’t bother me much. I did, though, find the various bizarre comments about rape from Republican candidates to be stupid and offensive, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they helped to cost enough potential Republican votes to sway the election.”

Here’s what he says about a few of the other Republicans:

“But I can’t picture myself voting for someone like Rick Santorum, either, or a Sarah Palin, or a Mike Huckabee, just to pick some well-known types. I’m sure that there are people out there who think that if we could just get some more candidates like these, that enough people would flock to their banner. I don’t see it happening; too many voters find something “off” about them. The streak of anti-intellectualism in the Republican party is in danger of making it a caricature of itself, and such a party would leave a lot of potential voters shaking their heads in the polling booth. I’d be one of them.”

So here’s a question for my non-religious Libertarian friends: all three of these people have political records; what is there in their records do you find objectionable? Were either Palin or Huckabee bad governors imposing their religious beliefs over the objections of the voters of their states? Was Santorum a bad Senator, and if so why?

You profess to be non-religious. Did these three propose or enact laws that made your views on religion more difficult for you? Did they do something in office that would have given any advantage to any religion that would have impacted atheists or violated the constitution?

Regarding the indiscriminate use of the term “anti-intellectualism,” I don’t think it means what you think it means. Certainly the moral and ethical basis for religious and non-religious people differs, but the presumption among atheists is that their prime moral and ethical bedrock is intellectually based while religious people wallow in some stupid superstitious mire. This is pure hubris and nothing could be further from the truth. Every one of us is a creature of our environment, shaped and molded by the culture in which we are immersed.  Modern atheists live in a culture and a moral environment that was shaped and molded by a religious people, specifically by Christianity.  They may rebel against it to some extent, but to suppose that they can invent their own truth is analogous to imagining that a fish can decide one day to leave the water, walk on land and breathe air.   

What you find “off” about them is the sort of thing I find “off” about many Libertarians: a sort of supercilious smugness that is as earned as Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize.

And to be perfectly clear, the Republican Party without religious people is the Libertarian Party which surpassed all its previous records and garnered an astounding 1% of the vote in 2012. I believe that the Republican Party can get along without the backbiting of people like Derek Lowe who view most of the others in the party as superstitious hicks who would impose the Christian version of sharia if they got the power. For some reason when they have the power that never happens, but in the fertile imagination of Derek Lowe a Christian like Sarah Palin is simply an ayatollah without the beard.  Reality-baseds not how I would describe Mr. Lowe.

Bill Whittle has a few words on this:

 

Rand Paul endorses Romney

I like Rand Paul.  He’s not the curmudgeon his father is and is likely to be a much more effective voice for small government than his father.  His support of Romney is an indicator that he knows how the system works.  You have a much better chance of changing the system from the inside than sniping from the outside.  Rand is much more likely to affect the course in Washington than his father ever did.

Rand Paul To Obama: "Do You Hate Rich People Or Just Rich People Who Don't Contribute To Your Campaign?"

Rush: Quit Taking Ron Paul Seriously

Ace of Spades

He's terrific, if you support an absolutist, doctrinaire policy of pacifism, which is in fact far more left-wing than Obama's, and may be more left-wing than Dennis Kucinich's.

People who support Ron Paul (and they are legion) turn a totally blind eye to the fact that he inhabits a world without people who want to kill us for existing.

"Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?"

Well, it's not the first question I would have about Perry, but someone seems to care.

Ron Paul Ad - It's Good!

Oh, Lord, another Liberal Infects Texas.

I’m sure Erica Douglass Is a perfectly fine human being. The fact that she’s a religious bigot doesn’t take away from that … unless you get on the subject of evolution. So don’t. And when you’re around her know that she likes life that’s laid-back and that she made a million dollars at age 26 selling her internet business. Now, having real money, she realizes that taxes and fees take it away from people like her; people who Barack Obama classify as millionaire and billionaires who own jets.

So this twenty-something millionaire has discovered the wonders of Libertarianism. She may not realize that the only Libertarian with national recognition is Ron Paul… who’s trying to run as a Republican. That’s because Paul (who Douglass thinks is a religious nut) realizes that Libertarians are not a viable party.

So Douglass is going to move to Austin, Texas, complete with her religious prejudices and her Liberal policies (with the exception of the taxes) and with her cohorts who move there with her will transform Texas into the hellhole that California has become.

Do you know why this will take place? Liberalism doesn’t start off as a power grab for your wallet. It starts off with the desire to help the downtrodden, help the environment, spend money to improve schools, build city parks and bike paths, help X, Y and Z. And if this doesn’t do it the problem is obviously that we’re not spending enough money on it. And each one of these wonderful initiatives will take only a few cents more per year; which is how California became the tax sucking hellhole that she’s trying to escape.

All this is unexceptional, and any politician who advocates for more of the same will get her vote, except … except if that politician is a Christian. That’s when he crosses the line and because he “doesn’t believe in evolution” he’s obviously not qualified to be on city council, much less be President, because if he takes office he’s going to … he’s where my imagination fails because I’m not sure what the consequences of a Christian who believes in God creating the heavens and the earth becoming President will do. But whatever the result, it’s obviously a character flaw that is much greater than sitting in Jeremiah Wright’s pews and making nice with home grown bombers like Bill Ayers. Obama’s problem was fiscal, not ideological.

Please stay in California. Infections should be isolated, not spread.

after a half-century or so of attacking even the notion of general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior ... that doesn’t work.

Glenn Reynolds makes the point that the Libertarian approach to speech has become so absolute that what couldonce be handled informally must either be ignored or turned into a criminal case.

See, you used to be able to punish the sort of behavior complained of here [referring to male taunts of women] on the ground that it violated general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior. But after a half-century or so of attacking even the notion of general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior — especially where sex is concerned! — that doesn’t work.

Universities have long told the larger culture that it must simply put up with whatever is said, however offensive, in the interest of free expression. Now we see more evidence that that was always a lie, a self-serving cover story that was really meant simply to protect speech that the larger culture didn’t want to hear, with no intention to protect speech that people at universities don’t want to hear. Universities, meanwhile, have become some of the most hostile environments for free speech anywhere in America.

That's why I'm not a Libertarian, and I suspect in their heart of hearts most Libertarians are not either.

A war to enable other wars.

Mickey Kaus on Libyan War = World Government? Not that there’s anything wrong with it.

It’s one thing for a supra-national authority–the U.N.–to authorize a war against someone who has committed cross-border aggression, or who has repeatedly violated earlier U.N. resolutions left over from a previous war. That was the case with Saddam in 2002–in theory.*

It’s another to let the U.N. authorize a war on what Obama calls ”humanitarian grounds”–whether it’s to stop actual killings or some less severe variety of “human rights violation.”

So far, atrocities in Libya are a little light on the ground. Sure, K. Daffy made some blood curdling threats, but how does the insurrection  in Libya compare in bloodshed to some of the countries in which the UN has not interfered?

But I would think it would deeply trouble those mainstream, non-libertarian conservatives who’ve been fretting about world government for decades. Now that world government is finally arriving, only Ben Stein seems alarmed. (I may have missed others.)

And how do non-Conservative Libertarians feel about it?

Letter to my Libertarian Friends.

From the summer of love to the fall of the Berlin wall, the Left’s basic concepts were built around the belief that Western civilization – more specifically America - was wrong, that free enterprise was evil, that individualism was selfish, that our Judeo-Christian heritage was really a stalking horse for theocratic despotism. We were all just meat puppets with all the meaning and grace of mayflies.

The fall of the USSR revealed that to be false. So now the Left is falling back to a kind of intellectual terrorism, to insult and ridicule, to putting borders around what can be said. Liberals can get away with that because they “own” the popular culture. It’s why they direct so much of their venom to voices that disagree or don’t reflect their views: Limbaugh, Beck, FOX News. These figures threaten the homogeneity of the Liberal culture, exposing its false facade. It’s why – for Liberals – the priests who molested altar boys were a gift - forgive the term - from God (and why they will vehemently deny that these priests were practicing homosexuals). For Liberals, the Catholic Church can now be smeared as a collection of sexual perverts thereby destroying its edifice.

The argument we are having in this country between the Left and the rest is not fundamentally an argument about taxes or government programs. It’s an argument about culture, an argument about religion and about good versus evil. That is one of the primary reasons why the Libertarian demand that Conservatives park their social issues at the door in choosing candidates is unrealistic. It’s essentially a demand that the majority of Americans give up their essential beliefs so that a small minority that has never managed to get more than a few percentages of voters to the polls can set the agenda.

Libertarians, the ones who write and publish and go on the internet to denounce people of faith as proto-Fascists and believers in fables, are going to have to decide whose policies are most closely aligned with their own. If you want to see laws enacted sanctioning homosexual marriage and the abolition of all drug laws, vote for the Liberal. The odds are in favor of you getting your agenda enacted into law faster. Just keep in mind that the Liberal has other items on his agenda that will make the government more intrusive than it already is. And those things either make you do something, stop you from doing something, or cost you money, limiting the choices you have and the resources you have left to do your own thing.

If the top item on your agenda is to be left alone by the government, vote for the Conservative. You may not like the fact that they consider some of your actions sinful and tell their kids not to do things that you think are perfectly great, but they turn a blind eye to what you do in private as long as you don’t scare the horses. They may not want the government to issue marriage licenses to Joy and Jane or Steve and Bill, but they won’t stop them from living together. It may outrage Joy, Jane, Steve and Bill to be denied this piece of paper, but they and their forebears lived by the same rules for millennia, so live with it. Lots of Jacks and Jills are living together without that piece of paper; maybe they’re on to something.

Conservatives in power may defund some government programs that you think are perfectly great, but that means that you can get together with your fellow Libertarians and fund them as private citizens.

One other thing that Conservatives will do is turn a jaundiced eye toward “Crony Capitalism.” Remember that Conservatives favor free enterprise. When government gets into bed with business, that’s not free enterprise. What Obama did to GM when he made government and the auto unions partners in the theft from bondholders is not free enterprise. What GE’s Jeff Immelt and Obama are hatching in their collusion is not free enterprise. Government hand-outs to government-preferred “green energy” producers is not free enterprise. Government is notoriously poor at predicting the future including the future of technology. Meanwhile the opportunities for corruption are limited only by the creativity of the ruling class and the number of dollars that are available.

Libertarians are a small voting minority with a loud voice. There are several aspects of Libertarianism that I support because I believe that the government is too intrusive and I believe that Libertarians agree. But I don’t believe that we are meat puppets. I believe that there is a higher power; that there is a God and that he is responsible for the creation of the universe. I also believe that he instilled in us the knowledge of right and wrong. Those things that are wrong fall under the term that has fallen into disuse: sin. Some in the Libertarian community are of the belief that the belief in sin is itself evil. If we are meat puppets, that would be true. Most Americans disagree. And it’s why Libertarians, as currently understood will always be a minority.  It's why I am a Christian Conservative.

Beyond Same Sex Marriage: Liberal Columbia Professor and Daughter Commit Incest

Professor David Epstein, Columbia University Political Scientist, Charged With Incest After Three-Year Relationship With Daughter

Palin-Hating Columbia Professor, Huffington Post Blogger, Busted for Incest

Huffington Post Blogger Charged With Incest

Professor David Epstein charged with incest with his daughter

Columbia professor is charged with incest, accused of bedding young relative for 3 years

Columbia University professor charged with incest

The law on "consensual" incest

A Columbia professor is charged over alleged sex with his adult daughter. An expert gives some legal background

Ivy League Professor and HuffPost Blogger Charged With Incest

HuffPo Bloggin', Obama-Lovin' Columbia Professor Charged With... Incest

Columbia Poly Sci Professor Accused of Diddling His Daughter

Here's a serious question: why are we repulsed by this and why are we supposed to celebrate same sex marriage?  The mantra about same sex marriage goes like this: why can't two people that love each other get married?  Epstein and his daughter are not even asking to get married; they just want to have sex.  If the Supreme Court has judged that it is not any of the law's business what two people do in the privacy of their bedroom, what's the argument for making what Epstein did to his daughter illegal?

Ann Coulter reminds us of the differences between Reagan and Goldwater.

As a one-off, 46-year-old example, Goldwater is like the Timothy McVeigh of conservative presidential candidates. But if Goldwater is going to keep being used as a boogeyman to scare conservatives, let's at least get the history straight.

Ironically, the elites also compared Reagan to Goldwater and predicted a devastating defeat for him in 1980. But Reagan didn't lose. He not only never lost an election, he never won by less than a landslide. (You might say Reagan's opponents suffered Goldwater-style defeats.)

So what was the difference between Goldwater and Reagan? Had the country changed that much in 16 years?

The social issues were the difference. Reagan agreed with Goldwater on fiscal and national defense issues, but by 1980, social issues loomed large and Reagan came down mightily on one side -- the opposite side as Goldwater, as it turned out.

Unlike abortion-loving Goldwater, Reagan said, "We cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide."

And unlike gay-marriage-loving Goldwater, Reagan said: "Society has always regarded marital love as a sacred expression of the bond between a man and a woman. It is the means by which families are created and society itself is extended into the future. ... We will resist the efforts of some to obtain government endorsement of homosexuality."

I preferred Goldwater to Johnson, but any time anyone tells you that social conservatives can't win but social liberals can, remember that Reagan won landslide victories while Goldwater lost in an equally big landslide.