JohnTabin.com

Upkeep

I haven't had a blogroll for a while, so I put one up (to your left and down). I know I missed a few of my regular reads, but it's a pretty good start, and they're grouped in ideological categories with tongue-in-cheek titles. (In case it isn't totally obvious, the groups are libertarian, conservative, centrist, liberal, and paleocon, in that order.) I encourage you to click around.

The Methodist Work Ethic

Props to Jim Antle for being the only goy to post at AmSpecBlog on December 25-26!

Happy Hanukkah

[Post re-dated to keep the menorah at the top of the page]

What Would It Look Like If He Did Know How To Respond?

"This is so unbelievably stupid, so pandering, so vacuous, so typical that I don’t quite know how to respond." -Jeremy Lott, Saturday, on Time's selection of "You" as Person of the Year.

"[750+ word column on Time's selection of "You" as Person of the Year]" -Jeremy Lott, today.

(My quick-take on the same topic here.)

Podcast #5: Libertarians, Liberals, and Swing Voters

In this edition Dave Weigel and I discuss how we define the libertarian vote and whether liberals and libertarians have a future together. Plus, we break new ground by including an audio clip taken from a relevant discussion at another website. The conversation runs 32 minutes, 45 seconds.

Download the .mp3 here.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

Dave on "The Myth of the 'Values Voters'"

My 2004 warning about values-vote hype

David Kirby and David Boaz on the libertarian vote (.pdf) and their recent TCS Daily column on the subject

Ramesh Ponnuru noting Republican gains among libertarians, and noting Kirby's point that this wasn't statistically significant

Daniel Larison arguing that the GOP can take libertarians for granted

Brink Lindsey's "Liberaltarians"

My skeptical take on Lindsey

Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat chatting about Liberaltarians

Noah Schactman in 2003 on libertarians flirting with Democrats (based on a sample from a small social circle)

Jeremy Lott on government vs. religion

Will Wilkinson on how Social Security is un-Rawlsian (.pdf; see pages 9-11)

Ezra Klein, uninterested in all this philosophy stuff

Left Ahead

Via Michelle Malkin comes news that lefthanded people -- like both Malkin and myself -- are mentally superior to the rest of you: Our brains are more efficient thanks to faster connections between hemispheres.

Figuratively True, But Literally Quite False

"The stiletto is always more fatal than the sledgehammer."

Meyer Lives

In my new AmSpec column, I respond skeptically to Brink Lindsey's proposal for a liberal-libertarian fusion to replace the old conservative-libertarian version.

Why Is This Hawk Worse Than All Other Hawks?

I don't get why so many of my friends are so down on Michael Ledeen. The guy has some blind spots, of course; he tends to discount the difficulty of fomenting revolution a bit too much, but that only makes him functionally more dovish than other neocons (to the extent that that word means anything). And he was quite precient about the difficulties that Syrian and Iranian meddling would pose in post-invasion Iraq.

I mean, I understand that MBD and Jim and Jeremy and Dave are dovish on Iran, but why does Ledeen seem to raise more hackles than those like Reuel Marc Gerecht or Bill Kristol, who actually want to bomb Iran ASAP (which Ledeen doesn't)? Is it the "realists and antisemites" comment? What am I missing here?

UPDATE: Jim Antle emails:

I find Ledeen more melodramatic than Kristol. Also, while I disagree with Kristol, I generally (though not always) think that he debates his opponents like a gentleman---again, not so Ledeen. But yeah, I think it was the realists as antisemites line that got me in the post you reference.

It's certainly true that Ledeen is a bit prickly, as anyone who's seen him in a panel discussion knows. I'm not so sure that the "realists and antisemites" line is so out of bounds (remember James Baker's infamous potty-mouthed imperative?), though I can see why it might feel like an unfair broad-brush smear. (I was tickled, incidentally, by the delicacy with which Jim recently phrased his dissent from the American Conservative line on Israel: He's "somewhat less optimistic about Palestinian intentions" than his old bosses.)