A Platform worthy of activists and candidates.

They're at it again. Those statist, socialist, nerf-core asshats of the Libertarian Reform Caucus, disguised as a legitimate Platform Committee, are presenting to the delegates at this week's LP Convention (which I am not attending, for professional reasons) what could be the Party's first respectable Platform since long before I joined up in '96.

Gone are the bizarre extremism of Murray Rothbard, Williamson Evers, and co. Gone are explicitly anarchist/nihilist clauses calling for a total end to taxation, an individual right to secession, and the like. Gone also is the bizarre four-part format which necessitated sloppy plank writing, encouraged sloppy thinking, and made dragged out, knock-down fights between the ideologues and the casuists inevitable.

If the delegates do not decide to take a step backwards and "Restore '04"--a good possibility given the outright veneration some give to Dave Nolan--the Party will have for the first time since the ideologues ruined it in the early 1980s a platform worthy of its activists. The committee's proposal is a platform candidates can stand on, a platform which won't make reporters think we're all anarcho-nihilists, a platform that won't turn people off to the party before they even encounter an active member, and a platform street-level organizers, like myself, won't have to explain away. ("No candidate in his right mind would advocate such a policy; that thing is flypaper for the ideologues and dunces!")

Jacob Hornberger, of course, will foam at the mouth due to paranoid fantasies of "compromise and concealment", as though we all really secretly believe in legal animal sex, a torts-only approach to environmental law, a total end to taxation, individual secession, and man-boy love. Just pat ol' "Bumper" on the head and recommend he submit an amendment.