Unforeseen Contingencies

Indeed, it's the Rockwellians of the Mises Institute, being unusually venomous, even by their own fever swamp standards. I'm not sure what prompted Thomas DiLorenzo's latest outburst, but he accuses every American who served in Iraq and Afghanistan of mass murder and having been on a killing spree. In another post, he stupidly confuses Keynesianism with Soviet central planning.

But it's not just our friend Thomas D. Another LRC blogger laments that western capitalism is coming to Libya, replacing firms controlled by dictaor Qaddafi. (Wait, wait, wasn't that the central planning you guys claim to be against?) In the same post, he alleges the U.S. is invading Uganda, Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia...(can he really be outraged that Obama is sending 100 trainers to help combat the Lord's Resistance Army? Has LRC sunk so low as to even make common cause with Joseph Kony???!!!)

The folks at LvMI have been livid about the death of Qaddafi. It was cold blooded murder by NATO according to Daniel McAdams. Lew Rockwell agrees it was first degree murder, but attributes it to Hillary Clinton, and also argues Barack Obama is a worse dictator than Qaddafi. (Lew, if Obama were a dictator, you would not be criticizing him in public -- you would be dead.)

I conjecture they are so angry because the NATO intervention went so well, and because their inane predictions that the U.S. would become trapped in a ground war proved laughably wrong. They also tend to regard anyone who opposes the United States as heroic, which puts them in very interesting company. (Of course, Rothbard celebrated when the communists took over South Vietnam, so why shouldn't the Rothbardians join the Marxist-Leninists and lament Qaddafi's demise?)

I make fun of these weirdos, but they are really not funny. They are a crazy, hate-filled band of lunatics, with no genuine regard for liberty or libertarianism, just hatred of the American state. You know, the one that brought down their beloved slave-holding Confederacy (a state itself, and an unusually nasty one at that, since it was founded to preserve chattel slavery). They are enemies of genuine liberty. Hmm...maybe they are monsters.

On the other hand, here is a genuinely thoughtful analysis of Qaddafi's demise by Simon Sebag Montefiore, chronicler of Stalin and his reign of terror. I agree with Montefiore, Qaddafi's demise was remarkably appropriate. As Montefiore puts it, "For someone who so thrived in the age of television, an impresario of many a circus of public violence, Colonel Qaddafi faced an entirely fitting end. When he asked his frenzied killers, who had known no other ruler in their lives, 'Do you not know the difference between right and wrong?' he had already taught them the answer. We may call this auto-tyrannicide."

Photo:The Creature from the Black Lagoon flees the fever swamp, after it realizes the Rockwellians have moved in.