Rumble in the Blogs

It seems that Evil Glenn is in a mad spot of trouble. In a story that I think shows yet another wide gulf of rifts in the entire right of center, there are calls for mass de-linking of him. And the main diatribe can be found here. What did Evil Glenn do to incur such wrath? Well, he made a backhanded comment in one of his microposts, basically dissing a huge anti-ACLU book. What did he say?

BOOKS LIKE THIS ONE ON THE ACLU, which I just got in the mail, are probably no worse than the myriad of hatchet jobs done in the past on, say, the NRA or (more recently) the Federalist Society. But I think that demonizing the ACLU is a bit silly. I do feel that they've become overly partisan in recent years, but they still do good work (I've worked with them in the past, on the New Orleans rave case for example, and will probably do so again.)

That's the post in its entirety. Now, of course people are piling on him about this. How the ACLU stands for the destruction of American values, how they are in league with Terrorists, how they are the secular Taliban, etc. etc. etc. Those who read this snippet are so furious they claim they'll never read Evil Glenn again (haha, yeah right) and are sponsoring a movement to have him stripped off all their blogrolls. This may fascinate people on the left, considering Glenn is scene as one of the biggest Republican/rightwing shills out there. Lordy be if he assert the slightest independent though.

But onto why we should even care about this. Anyone that reads any of the Evil One in any of his Evil Forms (1, 2, or 3) will be acqaunted with the fact that the man is pretty much a classical libertarian, though one that is also very hawkish on Foreign Policy. He is pro-choice, pro-stem-cell research, and anti-death penalty. Rightwing indeed! But he represents a certain wing of the Republican party that, while not possessing a huge political base (going back to today's earlier Fukuyama post), commands a share of "intellectual firepower." Libertarians, while they share with the Republican party much in terms of being skeptical of government, generally anti-tax and pro-growth, and somewhat hawkish on foreign policy, break ranks with them over social issues. Quite a few also over the failed GWOD (Global War on Drugs, of course). Evil Glenn is one such character. And it's not surprising he would help the ACLU, which is sympathetic to certain Libertarian goals on the social and civil end, on certain cases.

But, of course, this is just blood in the water to the crazy Ann Coulter right who like to throw around words like "treason", "traitor", "un-American" like pez dispensers of hyperbole. The libertarians have put much of their intellectual firepower to good use for the right, giving them great economic policy ideas, an alternate set of effective talking points, and basically fueling the ability of Republicans to compete in socially-liberal blue states by giving the Rudy Giulianis a tough yet liberty-friendly platform and ideology to stride forward on. And this backlash against Evil Glenn shows how much gratitude it has earned them. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy seeing extremists destroy the very people that help them with their agendas over minor squabbles. All the much more when I disagree with those extremists. But if extreme right wingers continue such witchhunts amongst the rank and file of their own side, they'll only have their own empty numbers and hyperbolic rhetoric to keep them company on election day.