Great libertarian rant

I think there are a lot of people who might otherwise be libertarians who are put off by the doctrinaire contrarianism practiced by the professionals. It's conservatives' gain; they know we like guns and small government and, while they might despise what they still call (though nobody else does) the War on Drugs, it doesn't affect them that much now that they're out of college. And they also realize that conservatives are mostly for small government and defending the borders, which besides building roads used to be one of the two legitimate functions of government that libertarians would acknowledge. So, even if we conservatives are a little boring and preachy we're not really that bad.

That's my thought. Here's Kathy Shaidle on why Reason magazine's doctrinaire libertarianism alienates almost everyone but RuPaul's Ron Paul's fanboy supporters:

Libertarians are basically just liberals with slightly larger vocabularies and even larger (and frequently less excusable) chips on their shoulders.

I know lots of folks equate sophomoric, bitchy sarcasm with brains, but really. If Reason is any indication, the average libertarian is just a cranky, white, able bodied, pot-smoking, childless fellow under 50 who reads too much (that is, any) science fiction and drops the name "Rothbard" a lot, and whose default worldview is "Hates Pretty Much Everything," especially anything/one corny and old fashioned (i.e. Mitt Romney and Ray Bradbury, to cite just two examples from the most recent blog posts) that might prevent them from having their somewhat grim idea of "fun". Being like Other People is the worst imaginable fate.

RELATED: Jay Nordlinger on why he left the Left:

And I am reminded of one of the reasons I fled the Left, many years ago: Personally, they were so mean — so nasty, so indecent. So full of mockery, ridicule, and scorn. I had to ask, “If the Left is the party of love and compassion, how come so many of them are such a**holes?”