September 23, 2005

Cindy Sheehan and Lew Rockwell: Birds of a Feather

For those of you who haven't gotten enough of Cindy Sheehan's pearls of wisdom, you have yet another opportunity to worship at her feet of clay.

Sheehan will be a featured speaker at Gold, Freedom and War, a conference in November to benefit LewRockwell.com. Here are some of the topics on tap:

The warmongering schemes for perpetual war for perpetual statism.
The Camp Casey revolution and the tipping point for peace.
Has the regime been fatally wounded?
The real reasons the neocons hate LRC.
How hurricanes and the "War on Terror" embolden the US police state.

Who is Lew Rockwell? Before stumbling across this conference on the Internet, I'd never heard of him. According to his website, he's a libertarian who "is an opponent of the central state, its wars and its socialism." The being against socialism is something I can agree with, but being an opponent of a central state and war? That smacks of anarchy to me. War, while not something to wish for, is a necessary evil when you're being attacked--and please remember that America was attacked on 9/11. And, some kind of government is necessary if humanity is to have any kind of stability and civility. Some governments are more preferable than others.

When I think of libertarians, I think of guys like Neil Boortz. Reading what Rockwell stands for and reading some of the posts on his blog (written by various minions), he doesn't sound like much of a libertarian to me--he sounds more like a crackpot with visions of grandeur. A little Web research shows that someone with more credibility than I have agrees with me.

Back in 2001, Jonah Goldberg wrote about LewRockwell.com for the National Review. Here's a little of what he had to say:

It's a site for angry libertarians. Kick-the-cat, yell-at-the-TV, demand-a-refund, take-your-marbles-and-go-home libertarians. They want their government smaller Ã‘ a lot smaller Ã‘ and they're willing to march into the kitchen and make a big stinking scene if they don't get things their way: Now!

Ouch! Goldberg wrote a followup to that column, click here to read it.

Here are a few things Rockwell himself had to say about the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) back in 2003 on Bill Moyers' now-defunct PBS show (all emphases mine):

So you have all kinds of money taken out of productive private savings and investment to build bombs and missiles that it's economically dangerous. And then it of course like every single war in our history it empowers the government to suppress dissent, to abolish civil liberties, to grow. That's one of the reasons governments love a war. Because it does enable them to grow and to brand anybody who disagrees with them as unpatriotic.

So all of the dissent we've been exposed to in the past couple of years has been officially oppressed by the government? What have we been seeing then, reality TV on the streets?

I'm sure Saddam Hussein is not a good guy, after all he's a politician. But it is the most liberal regime in the Arab world in many senses. You can get a drink in Baghdad. Unlike in Saudi Arabia. Women don't have to wear any particular kind of clothing. Christianity is tolerated.

Gee, according to Rockwell, Hussein got a bad rap. Click here to read the whole interview.

So we really shouldn't be surprised that Rockwell and Sheehan have gotten together. Maybe we should wonder why it took so long. And for $200 plus travel, food and lodging expenses, you can get two for the price of one!