The many lessons of the Rand Paul "controversy."

Jacob Hornberger has written a great response to the liberal attacks on Rand Paul’s politically incorrect statements about Article II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars private businesses from discriminating on the basis of race.

Writes Hornberger,

Suppose a certain white homeowner in a community publicly announces that he is holding a weekly TGIF cocktail party at his home every Friday night. He publicly invites everyone who lives within a one-mile radius of his home to his parties, but with a big exception. He says: Blacks and Jews are not invited and will not be permitted into his home.

How would libertarians respond? We would say that that man has every right in the world to take that position. We might criticize him, we might condemn him, we might ignore him, we might boycott his parties. But we would defend his right to discriminate against anyone he wants, as a matter of principle. After all, we would argue, it’s his home — his private property. To paraphrase Voltaire, we might not agree with how he uses his property, but we would defend his right to use it any way he wants. That’s what private ownership and a free society are all about.

Bumper's Response to an Angry Liberal, and what that Angry Liberal's Attack Can Teach Us about Many Modern Progressives

Recently, Jacob Hornberger was attacked by DailyKos blogger John Sumner, and responded masterfully.  Mr. Hornberger notes that while liberals may differ from conservatives at the grassroots level, their leaders have always and continue to endorse welfare, statism, and killing hundreds thousands of innocent people. Indeed, he concludes, it is only the radical libertarians that oppose such evil, while the left largely acquieces to it.

Hornberger is, of course, right. The fact that he -- and "the movement" in general-- represents the real oppostion to war and the establishment is, I think, the source of the hatred from pro-Obama progressives like Sumner, Markos Moulitsas and ThinkProgress bloggers.  The endless mockery and implications of "racism" -- noticeably absent in the analyses of principled progressives like Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher -- stems from the realization by power-mad lefties that, for all their PC speech codes and heresy hunting, we the Wal-Mart shopping radicals are pro-peace and they, the kumbaya-singing Obamaites, are de facto pro-war at day's end.