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How libertarians vote. By Ampersand, of course.

A Texas Air National Guard pilot who has been A.W.O.L. for 31 years dramatically reappeared on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier 30 miles off the coast of San Diego, California.

I understand that uptight lecturer on other people’s morals William Bennett has lost millions of dollars in gambling.
So much for any remaining credibility of the Republicans being the “party of fiscal responsibility”…

I genuinely cannot understand how real conservatives or libertarians still can support the Republican Paty, a party which has become the refuge of he racist (Lott), the bigoted (Santorum), the hypocrite (Bennett), the wannabe-fascist (Ashcroft),
the corrupt (Cheney) and the incompetent (Bush).

Rafe Colburn goes back to Colin Powell’s big speech at the UN and asks some impertinent questions:

I still await the long article that will go over each of Powell’s claims and discuss them in depth. Was the al-Kindi company building mobile weapons labs? Where are the Iraqi officials and soldiers whose voices were featured in the recordings that Powell used in his speech? We have in custody at least one member of the “Higher Committee for Monitoring the Inspection Teams,” what do they have to say? Where are the secret files and prohibited items that were supposedly being hidden in private homes and concealed by being driven around the country? Where are the warheads armed with biological weapons that were dispersed to western Iraq? Why weren’t they used when we invaded?

[…]

The other question that must also be asked is why I care in the first place. We went to war with Iraq, we won the war, and there’s little doubt that Iraqis are better off without Saddam than they were with him. The reason I’m still keeping track of this stuff is that I firmly believe we were led to war under false pretenses. I said it before the war, I said it during the war, and I’ve said it since. Next year we’re going to have a Presidential election in which the incumbent is a man who played upon the rightful fears of Americans to gain their assent to a war fought for reasons that he and his advisors would rather not openly acknowledge. I think we deserve better treatment from our leaders than that.

Shadow of the
Hegemon hammers in a vital point:

It remains important, however, to avoid mixing up forests and trees. This individual salvo at Prof.
Krugman, and even the attacks on Prof. Krugman himself, are merely a part of the larger whole. If this
attack were aimed at a supporter of the Bush administration, it would have been quickly rebutted by a whole
bevy of sources, and there are countless outlets by which the rebuttal can be spread and repeated, to the
point that the rebuttal becomes better known than the original charge. That this has a lot to do with the
power of the Presidency is important, but as “Issuesguy” has
been pointing out, it is vitally important to look beyond the words, and start looking at the broader
patterns of behavior, because politics nowadays is as much about how, where, and how often words are used
as it is about the words used themselves. When employing the Big Lie, after all, it’s almost unimportant as
to what the substance of it really is, as long as its consistent and serves some political aim.