Steve LaBianca is not being "harsh", but rather merely ignorant. The distinction he cannot bring himself to face is that between 1) rigidly abstaining from all possibility of committing force initiation and 2) wanting society to enjoy the lowest possible net incidence of force initiation. I explained it to him at http://more.libertarianintelligence.com/2008/04/non-aggression-is-not-so-simple.html, but he'd rather just make stuff up about the Reform Caucus than try to grasp a point that takes more than a bumper sticker to explain.
It's simply ignorant to say that the Barr campaign is a "brainchild of the Reform Caucus". Of the few Reform Caucus leaders whose presidential preference I know, more (including me) preferred Root than Barr. (I also preferred Phillies to Barr, and voted for Phillies in the California primary, at the California convention, and on the first ballot in Denver. I only voted for Barr on the last ballot, over an anarchist who said she was "fully attuned to the Libertarian philosophy" and said she will "really explain to the American people what we truly are all about". We all know what that explanation turned out to be.) Reform Caucus meetings in Denver drew no more than ten people. The Reform Caucus in Denver put zero effort into the presidential race and maintained strict neutrality; all our effort went into Platform and SoP reform. We lost on SoP because delegates are instinctively suspicious of treating the actual rules as more binding that what they thought the rules were. We won on Platform because the delegates -- who generally don't care about caucuses and mostly don't know they exist -- wanted a repaired Platform that could be adopted in one day, and we on PlatCom had worked hard to offer one to them.
It's simply ignorant to say that "the Reform Caucus has control of the reigns of the LP". The Reform Caucus is in fact pretty much in hibernation. Three of the Reform Caucus leadership ran for party office in Denver, and all three lost. Only two voting members of the LNC are members of the Reform Caucus: one I had no idea was a member and only joined a few weeks before Denver, and the other is not in the caucus leadership and has only posted to our forum on a single day a year and a half ago. By contrast, five members of LNC -- Ruwart, Wrights, Keaton, Hinkle, Hawkridge -- are prominent players in the Radical Caucus and/or Restore04. Lark is also a nominal Radical Caucus member and is endorsed by them, but I've never heard of him being active on their forum.
These are the facts. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled name-calling against the "Retard"/"Defraud" Caucus, already in progress.
