mushinnoshin

If you’re like 99.5% of the country, you probably haven’t kept up with the circus sideshow that is the Libertarian Party campaign this year. But it actually has been entertaining in a “can’t not watch the trainwreck” sort of way.

To recap it for the rest of you — well most of you know about Ron Paul and his merry band of libertarian-republicans by now. Of course selling out to anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-immigrant social conservatives seriously pissed off the left half of the libertarian spectrum, but since the libertarian party tilts to the right anyway, most of them got sucked up in the drama of moneybombs and rEVOLutions and set their left-libertarian and anarcho-purist constituencies out to rot. We’re going to take over the Republican Party! We could even win the White House! Yeah, how did that work out for ya?

Well, surprise surprise the party of big government mercantilists, war pigs, and civil paternalists had no use for a small government capitalist anti-interventionist libertarian — even if he was otherwise sufficiently backwards socially. Who would have guessed? Of course there were saner heads who knew the primary run was a windmill tilt, but they fully expected Paul would grab his twenty mil and come back the LP. Again surprise surprise, he didn’t — just like he repeatedly said he wouldn’t, over and over again the entire time he was running.

But the LP conservatives already had what they wanted — a weakened left flank and a hyped up right flank that desperately wanted to believe they could just replace the driver with any semi-famous Republican and keep going. The party was ripe to nominate a polished turd of a conservative Dixiecrat, and after seven or so contentious ballots, that’s what they did.

And long story short, it has been an unmitigated disaster. Poor fund raising, campaign mismanagement, a depressed base, and a general loss of pretty much any respectability the LP might have once had. And it all came to a head last week, when Barr got his feelings hurt when Ron Paul didn’t give him an exclusive endorsement, and decided it was somehow better to piss on Paul and his supporters than to play nice and smile for an hour.

Which has all led to this moment, as LP founder David Nolan has now declared The Barr Campaign is Over.

Of course I gave up on the LP a long time ago as my views shifted leftward, but still it’s a little sad watching your old friends eat themselves.

PS: For any of you who do consider yourself libertarian and don’t know what else to do at this point, you can vote for the Boston Tea Party ticket of Charles Jay and Thomas Knapp. I don’t know much about Jay but I’ve got mad respect for Knapp, and that’s possibly how I’d vote if I wasn’t on board with Obama.