13 February 2008

Liberty! Liberty!

What do you know? Perhaps National Review, that bastion of neoconservatism, can tolerate a genuine difference of opinion after all. John Derbyshire now supports Ron Paul:
How on earth did we arrive at this point of vast, bloated, and secretive government, in which the wives of inconsequential federal officials (the office of the vice presidency used to be a byword for inconsequentiality — “bucket of warm p***,” etc.) have chiefs of staff, whose actual staffs and actual budgets are undiscoverable by a reasonably intelligent citizen?
...
What I am seeking is an anti-JFK — a candidate who will transform our nation’s capital from a city of hope for middle-class intellectuals, into a city of despair for them. The despair of those intellectuals, I am increasingly convinced, is the hope of our nation. Looking at all but one of the Republican candidates (and, it goes without saying, all but none of the Democratic ones) I see nothing in prospect but a new draft of office-seeking intellectuals, primed and eager to bring us new expansions of federal power, new pointless wars, new million-strong reinforcements for the Reconquista, new thousand-page tax loopholes, new inducements for idleness and crime, new humiliations for the saps who follow rules and obey laws.
...
Are [Ron Paul] supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?

Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules, and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our sense of nationhood (“Press one for English …”), of speech codes and race lobbies and judicial impositions.

If those people are crazy, though, I want to be crazy with them. I’m for liberty, too. That’s why I’m for Ron Paul. And why do we have 75,000 soldiers in Germany?
This from the man who originally said "Ron Paul is not possible."

Update: A friend has alerted me to the fact that NR's David Freddoso is also supporting Paul.