ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART FFS.

At The Federalist, Georgi Boorman gives us the usual rightwing schtick about ISIS (i.e., Obama's a pussy let's get our war on):

Despite Boko Haram’s purported pledge of fealty to ISIS, apparently neither organizations’ bloody rampages have reached the level of egregiousness that stirs the executive branch to crush the evil gobbling up Iraq and surrounding territories. President Obama has told us repeatedly that there will be “no boots on the ground” save for “advisers, trainers, and security personnel.” Regardless of whether the advisory missions happen to put those advisers in a combat role, the goal, apparently, is to keep us “out of another ground war.” 

Whether this be on principle of non-interference or sheer ignorance of an organization that will, if unchecked, eventually threaten global stability, the result is inaction (save for a few airstrikes).

By "a few airstrikes," Boorman of course means over 1,300 as of December 2014. At The Federalist, bullshit walks and talks!

The U.S. military wears a heavy boot, but at the moment it does nothing more than cast a shadow over the growing terrorist threat.

With a prose style like that Boorman will go far in the movement. But she still has to thread the needle: something that looks like a solution to ISIS but doesn't come with blinking QUAGMIRE tags all over it. Her Big Idea: Bring back privateers!

“Privateers” were given letters of marque permitting them to capture and plunder enemy ships; an admiralty court adjudicated on the legality of the capture... 

To fight war tourists like Jihad John, hire some guns! Maybe they'll be dashing, shiver-me-timbers young libertarians looking for adventure! Or Somali pirates fresh out of prison!  (Probably, though, they'll be petty criminals and navy rejects with nothing left to lose.)

Some will rightly point out the potential for abuse, as there almost certainly will be, as with all social and governmental institutions. However, the U.S. government would be holding accountable a much smaller group of individuals, whose scope of operations are far more limited than the expansive U.S. military. If abuse were to be found, processes for investigation and prosecution would be in place to swiftly bring to account and deal punishment for violations, as they had in the past.

You know, like with Blackwater.

Some less rational factions will undoubtedly hail this as a crazy right-winged conspiracy to privatize the military. But Founders did not design a Constitution with powers that undermine other powers. If letters of marque were a tool of privatization, what good would it have been to include provisions, just a few lines below this, “to raise and support armies” and to “provide and maintain a Navy”?

I dunno -- the Post Office is also in the Constitution, but conservatarians want to privatize that, too. Self-evidently, their dream is to strip the federal government for parts and empower privateers to handle all its former functions. Of course, the ones who would be fighting ISIS for us would be flying no flag but the Jolly Roger, and if it should turn out that someone else is offering better pay than Uncle Sam, there's nothing to stop them from turning their guns around. That's what happens when you love the market more than your country.

AND THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR WHINING.

I think most of my readers will agree that the murder by ISIS of Christians in Egypt is bad, right? Well, that's not enough for conservatives -- you have to agree with them that Christians here in the States are persecuted, too, or you suffer from "anti-Christian bias." Here's Rod Dreher's brain-teaser on the subject, from his evocatively-titled post "Lions & Christians in America":

The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like. Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians point to as an argument-ender when Christians complain about social injustice against themselves, e.g., “Get back to me when they’re chopping Christian heads off, then we’ll talk.” I would point out that ISIS is throwing gay men out of high windows to their deaths, and the crowds below are finishing off the job with stones. No secular liberal would — nor should — accept the argument that gays in the US have no right to complain against discrimination because they don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed.

Based on this, if some nut on the other side of the world is persecuting your affinity group, you're being persecuted here as well, or should at least be treated as if you were. I wonder if Dreher knows that ISIS is a champion killer of Muslims, and would agree that we should for that reason hold our domestic Muslims as a persecuted group as well, and tell their stateside critics like Pam Geller and Daniel Pipes to fuck off.

No chance of that -- you can read farther down Dreher's post about the media's "normalization of homosexuality," just a small number of paragraphs after Dreher was using gays as a point of comparison with Christians. At National Review, Jim Geraghty also thinks the newsies are unfair to American Christians; he heads toward the same affirmative-action argument we often get about conservatives in the press, but is smart enough to realize that most reporters are probably at least nominally Christian -- or else Jewish, and he can't complain about that; think what Bibi Netanyahu would say! -- so he takes an interesting tack:

Last night I argued that in most media newsrooms, the notion of Christians as victims doesn’t fit their usual narratives. Fournier argued that there are a lot of Christians in the Times newsroom, and that the Times has a lot of reporters in the Middle East, covering ISIS, at considerable risk to themselves. Both points are true but neither really refutes my argument. 

For starters, sure there are Christians in the Times newsroom, but not particularly representative ones. Here’s Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, back in 2003: “Nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans. That’s the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians.”

So it's not enough for reporters to go to some modern Church where anything goes -- one has to roll hard and roll holy! Picture the new breed of newsroom quota-Christians: Fear-God Gump and Barebone McGillicuddy, working on a Style section piece about a hip new way to handle snakes.

My own solution would be regular cats-for-Christ slideshows, which should give everybody what they want, or at least deserve.

UPDATE. Mmm, them's some good comments, e.g., Megalon:

[Dreher says,] "The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like." 

Yes it is. That's why you and your cohorts in this country trying to claim that having to accept a paying job to bake a gay wedding cake means you're being persecuted the same way is so offensive. Especially when it's coming from a man who often talks like he's about ten minutes away from converting and joining IS himself.

Also, Hob runs down Kristof's shady "a group that includes 46 percent of Americans" = fundies claim and finds it possibly lacking. I wouldn't be surprised, but then, the claim is 15 years old -- maybe since then millions of Americans have got born-again, moved to the haunts 'n' hollers, and stopped voting, which explains how Obama won twice.

UPDATE 2. If we ever get Cats for Christ (no not this one) off the ground, I think we have to use ADHDJ's topline: "I'm not purrfect, just furgiven."

NEXT WEEK: PINOCHET WAS NO ANGEL BUT AT LEAST HE WASN'T A SOCIALIST.

There's plenty of argh-blargh over Obama mentioning the Crusades and the Inquisition at the National Prayer Breakfast, on the apparent grounds that Christians aren't like that any more, whereas all Muslims are ISIS sleeper agents waiting for the word of the Prophet to leap out of their taxicabs and convenience stores and do jihad. (Also Obama mixed in slavery and Jim Crow, and that was totally the Democrats!)

Most of the brethren are content with ordinary, meretricious bullshit ("Obama uses National Prayer Breakfast to compare Christianity to ISIS," lies Some Guy at RedState); but making everything worse as usual is Jonah Goldberg, who has a long history of defending the viciousness of the Church (particularly toward Galileo, which Goldberg describes as a sort of innocent misunderstanding among friends) and, roused by an Obama news hook, stumbles onstage with his Inquisition Was Not So Bad crib notes:

As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.

It's like when your friend says that boring lecture was "torture" -- just a figure of speech! Yet libtards get mad when you subject a Gitmo detainee to the equivalent of a boring speech.

I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was indefensible. But there’s a very important point to make here that transcends the scoring of easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to Islamic extremism (which he will not call Islamic): Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.

Hitler has a bad rap but if only you'd seen him with his dogs, etc. The thing you have to remember about this yap is, it's not meant to convince normal people, who will be giving it that Springtime for Hitler stare, but to soothe whatever vestigial sense of shame is left among the true believers. (Goldberg even brings up Martin Luther King to defend Christianity, which for conservatives is definitely like knocking down chairs behind you when you're on the run from the cops.)

Goldberg also says that Inquisition stuff was a long time ago, but take a look at Goldberg himself and all the freaks and monsters with whom he associates; you just know that if the coast were clear, if the effects of the Enlightenment (including the founding of this Republic) were completely dead and faded, they'd be burning and beheading to beat the band.

UPDATE. I am grateful for the reminder from Chauncey DeVega at Alternet that, regarding the Big Long Time Ago objection to speaking ill of the godly, some horrific lynchings of black men were performed within living memory. Klansmen didn't burn giant question marks on people's lawns, y'know, and Bizarro Jesus is often an honored guest at outbreaks of American mayhem.

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson has spoken:

Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is.

He's got a point. There's no evidence that Obama beats his children, fucks his cousin, goes out of his way to make other people miserable, seethes with hate at the unfair advantages enjoyed by the poor, or many of the other traditional hallmarks of Christendom. Being a politician, though, he does lie habitually, so maybe he can be redeemed.