Via Brad Spangler
Dana Rohrabacher wants me dead. Well, not just me. Dana Rohrabacher wants a whole bunch of Americans dead.
“I hope it’s your family members that [sic] die,” said US Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to American citizens who questioned the Bush administration’s unlawful extraordinary rendition policies.
Rohrabacher, bring it you fucking traitor.
“But in 1969-71, Dana Rohrabacher was the most successful and most beloved libertarian activist… he was a close friend of mine until he crossed the line with his campaign for Congress.“ — Samuel Edward Konkin III
This reminds me. I’ve been trying to get confirmation as to whether Rohrabacher was a warmonger during the Vietnam War. As a former anarchist and follower of an actual pacifist, Robert LeFevre, it would have been illogical, but I would like independent reports from those who actually knew Rohrabacher back then.
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Hey, that Wiki photo doesn’t look like the Dana I used to know. Didn’t know him well, but he threw some awesome penthouse parties at his place in Belmont Shore. Awesome enough to make the guys who’d be today’s neo-cons pretty nervous.
Was he a pacifist in those days? Can’t remember for sure but maybe. Was he a drug warrior in those days? No.
Talk to Gene Berkman at Renaissance Books, he knew him pretty well. There are others who knew him well but they won’t talk I’m sure.
Don’t think it’s available on line, but Gene wrote a piece for New Republic called the Dope On Dana. Entertaining stuff that Dana called character assassination. No libel suit was forthcoming.
The Wine Commonsewer
We’ll see if the signature tag takes (no preview available)
yeah, fuck Dana Rohrabacher. he calls Obama a “creampuff” but was willing to bend over and take it in the garage for eight years under Bush, the Yale male cheerleader/draft dodger.
A rough idea of my views: Agorism = An bad word for market anarchism that is is suitably obtuse to identify it as Konkin’s. It is also an excuse to be lazy and not try to win office, while still calling yourself a “libertarian” (and possibly using a position in the LP to cause infighting and promote yourself). Voluntaryist = Agorist who doesn’t call himself an agorist. Voluntaryist = Should be someone who is everything described at the voluntaryist.com website, minus the strategical prohibition of involving oneself in elections as an advocate of voluntaryism (purist libertarianism).
As far as Rohrabacher:
My guess: There are strange psychological phenomena at work in Dana’s head. And bad alliances pushing him in a less libertarian direction than he would choose if he were more able to win re-election on his own (with no outside funding). I read in Doherty’s book that Rohrabacher traveled the country with a banjo singing radical anarchist tunes, and organizing YAF (Young Americans for Freedom) clubs (the precursor to today’s Libertarian Clubs) on many college campuses.
After getting elected, he was also a speechwriter for Reagan (how Reagan talked the talk), and a friend of Ollie North (one reason why he probably espouses foreign intervention). It’s easy to find his quotes at WIKI about eschewing the “more extreme” philosophy of his “youth”.
Sad that he (seemingly) didn’t continue to grow and mature as an anarcho-capitalist libertarian thinker.
He now favors “keeping the illegals out”. How he reconciles that with even slight voluntaryism, I have no idea. …Pure BS.
Still, he was on Bill Maher, and he stuck up for marijuana legalization, and seemed to want to be included in the radical “in crowd”. He called himself a surfer. He seemed to lay claim to being more libertarian than Bill Maher, but the irony is that he’s about as libertarian as Bill Maher now is, AFTER having been exposed to a hardcore libertarian philosophy (LeFevre, Watner). …For shame.
I think it’s too bad that most sane libertarians don’t want to run for office. That’s my assessment, of course, but it does seem to be either a major factor, or even a limit to the growth of the LP.
Some suggestions: 9/10 of running for office as a Libertarian is to simply not give the establishment an easy target:
1) Wear a suit every day
2) Speak in complete and proper English sentences
3) Put up a website that doesn’t indicate that you are delusional (my own 2004 website failed this “delusional” test, but I was only running as a paper candidate so that the CLP was not automatically removed from the ballot in 2004. I had to get 5% of the vote and I got 4% and we were removed. But I got that 4% while being out of state for my entire campaign. Even now, I would have been able to afford a better “ready-made” blog site.)
4) Don’t do anything that’s certifiably insane or obviously out-of-step with the people you expect to elect you (eat colloidal silver until you turn blue, run for president without being able to afford air-travel, tell people you’re going to run a “write-in” campaign, champion some aspect of socialism until the LP rightfully disowns you, etc…), and check out questionable actions with your rational and politically-aware campaign manager, or advisor if you are too cheap to have a campaign manager. (One such delusional action might be “taking a seat” for principle during the pledge of allegience. Such as what happened in Alaska’s 20th district in 2006.)
THEN, DO THE NECESSARY MINIMAL WORK:
5) Walk your entire district with an email signup sheet and your campaign materials. If neither you nor another libertarian that you COMPLETELY trust to do an EQUALLY good job can walk your district, then run for the next smaller office. You should have simple notes about what every household in your district believes.
There are a host of minor things that most libertarian campaigns DO NOT DO. Hence, they can not expect to win office, no matter how many years the LP has been in existence. (This is the problem, and NOT the “problems” that Konkin points to, such as “it’s impossible to make a change within the system”. Such comments mark one as a neophyte to political thinking.)
My point is simply that it is sad that Rohrabacher can remain elected as a state legislator, but consistent libertarians cannot. (The ones who could have, always got stars in their eyes and ran for higher offices they could not win.) I’d like to see Rohrabacher have more competition for consistency from the LP.
…Still, Rohrabacher’s at least more libertarian than most state legislators on most domestic issues. (Such as marijuana legalization, and gun rights. Given his weakness on immigration, who knows how he stands with respect to ending all drug prohibition?)
If I could, I’d suggest to Rohrabacher that he vote in line with the LP platform, but neither I nor anyone else libertarian apparently has much sway over Dana. So I wish him well when he’s voting libertarian, which is more of the time than most legislators.
I should point out that when Konkin rejected Rohrabacher’s friendship, he thereby eliminated any ability to influence Rohrabacher in the direction of voluntaryism. The same with anyone else who pursues a path of “relinquishment”. (The same applies to nanotechnologists for similar reasons.)
-Jake