Phillies Sees A Traitor Under Every Stone

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/04/current-leadership-of-the-lp

George Phillies, you wrote recently: GP) I urge readers to avoiding funding fraud by sending their donations beyond minimum dues to organizations other than LNC, Inc, e.g., your fine state party organization, at least in states where there is a state party that has not been taken over by Republicans. (GP

I replied: BH) George, do you have a list of state LP affiliates that “have been taken over by Republicans”? Can you even name one? This whole McCarthy-esque I-have-a-secret-list-of-Republican-infiltrators trope is getting pretty tedious. (BH

Your inconsistent initial reply was to 1) claim your comment was a "hypothetical" but to then 2) talk anonymously about "the state party whose officer and lead activist are promoting running as Republicans and not Libertarians".  Only later did you finally reveal that you were talking about LPRI leaders joining state and local GOP leadership and running as Republicans, and you pronounced it "a Republican takeover".  (So is LPRI the only state affiliate you can list for us, or do you have others?)

I don't see how you can call Libertarian infiltration into the GOP a "Republican takeover" of the LPRI.  "X takeover of Y" suggests that people who were already X's take control of Y.  You apparently are talking about people already in control of Y becoming X's in an apparent attempt to take control of other X's.  If instead this has caused a "takeover" of the LPRI by un-libertarian Republican ideas, then I again ask you to please show your work and give us at least a shred of evidence for this.

I stand by everything I said in the discussions mentioned above, and I repeat my advice that when you talk about "Republican takeovers", that you muster the courage to name the people and organizations that you're alluding to (i.e. smearing).

You now follow my advice by hilariously naming me as a " former Libertarian who converted to Republicanism".  I will now demonstrate why your first instinct was to not try to attach names and facts to your anonymous charges, because in doing so you've exhibited your ignorance in multiple ways.

1. The issue here in California isn't "civil union" but an entirely new take on "domestic partnership".  "Civil union" (along with all other previous attempts at "domestic partnership") is a tepid separate-but-equal attempt to grudgingly concede a subset of marriage rights/privileges to same-sex couples.  What we in the LPCA just endorsed was a proposed initiative to completely rename the opposite-sex legal concept of "marriage" with a sex-blind universal concept of "domestic partnership".

2. The Domestic Partnership Initiative isn't "homophobic".  It in fact repeals the homophobic Prop 8 by striking from the CA Constitution all the text that Prop 8 added.  The motion to endorse DPI was made by our Northern Vice Chair who is also openly gay and a prominent member of the Outright Libertarians.  Calling his endorsement "homophobic" is not only ignorant but shameful.

3. Renaming "marriage" to "domestic partnership" is not at all "a key Republican position".  The 2008 Republican platform states: "the traditional understanding of marriage [requires] a constitutional amendment that fully protects marriage as a union of a man and a woman, so that judges cannot make other arrangements equivalent to it".  It's ignorant to suggest the GOP would ever endorse the passage of the DPI.

4. I am indeed "pro-choice", as I adamantly defend Roe v. Wade and the absolute right to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester.  (I also defend the right to end a pregnancy in the third trimester if it leaves a healthy fetus unharmed.)  90% of abortions in America are in the first trimester, and a large fraction of remaining abortions are of fetuses with horrible congenital defects.  Saying I am not "pro-choice" is simply ignorant of the facts.

5.  If the Platform changes I favored -- and which you don't here even oppose -- make me "look like a Republican infiltrator", then there must have been hundreds of us in Denver, because those changes won slam-dunk 2/3 approval among the 600 delegates there.  Do you dare say that any delegate in Denver was "a Republican infiltrator" if they voted for the 2008 Platform?

Note that you're issuing these smears against someone who voted for you for president three times in 2008: in the LPCA primary, in the LPCA convention straw poll, and on the first ballot in Denver.  In Jan 2008 I wrote that the biggest obstacle facing Phillies was "his tendency to personally attack libertarians who disagree with him on policy and (especially) on LP administration".  You seemed to try to tone that down for the last few months before Denver, but I guess old habits die hard.  I still think you were the best in the 2008 field at presenting the LP message to the outside world, but I see now that your need to find a traitor under every stone inside the LP means that we'll never get a chance for you to top our Presidential ticket.  That is a bigger opportunity cost to the LP than any damage I could ever be accused of inflicting on it.