One of those stories peeling back the layers of which takes you exactly where you thought it would

So, like everybody else, a few minutes ago I saw the featured Yahoo News story about the billboard in Idaho comparing America's reaction to the Aurora, CO shootings to US policy in Afghanistan.  It features the vulgar side-by-side visual of Holmes over the death toll of his rampage and the MEC over the troop-casualty stats for Afghanistan.

First thought before I even finished the news story: libertarian stunt.  A quick Google search confirmed my hunch: Lew Rockwell has blogged his endorsement of the move.  The particular group that put up the billboard is the Ralph Smeed Foundation.  So a search based on Smeed and Rockwell takes one to Rockwell's eulogy for Smeed when he passed away, a piece that includes a photo of Smeed shaking hands with Ron Paul.

In a world where lack of seriousness has become the norm, this particular brand of it is perhaps the most annoying, maybe even moreso than the knee-jerk Freedom-Hatred of the left.  How an ideology that gets it so right on economic matters could be so wacky on foreign policy eludes me no matter how many explanations of it I read.  These people don't even seem to care that they sabotage their own devotion to freedom by turning their movement into a distraction from what the world is actually grappling with.  The news of the day could be some cultural outrage, or, more to the point, some economic front on which freedom is being snuffed, and these people want to talk about how "America should mind its own business."

I have a dear old friend - he and his wife socialize frequently with me and my wife - who goes in for this stuff big-time.  It used to be that we could have some great, lengthy conversations about the statist threat to liberty, and the insanity of financing a caretaker state with ever-soaring debt.  We were on the same page.  Now, when I see him in the supermarket or some such place and begin a conversation with "How about that [insert latest move by FHers in Congress, or speech by the Most Equal Comrade]," he immediately veers into something about the perpetual war machine, utterly obscuring any difference between this administration and past ones that actually did forcefully look after America's strategic interests (which this one doesn't).  It is now so front and center among his concerns that his whole outlook is distorted.

They sabotage their own love of liberty by providing low-hanging fruit to the wacky left that will use something like this billboard to once again gin up "climate-of-hate" and even "racism" rhetoric to try to squelch any criticism of the Most Equal Comrade.  All free-market proponents thereby have a much harder task as a result.

Libertarianism doesn't work because a cherishing of freedom must be anchored to an understanding that the universe has an order to it that requires our vigilant defense.  Freedom isn't worth much in a world of irreversible chaos.