For those who have the stuff

I like writers who talk about big ideas and know what they're talking about when they employ them.

A Global Fervor

It's about goddamn time H.L. Mencken gets a mention in this age of queasiness about liberal values and their role in democratic life. For all their talk about being tough, one place where most candidates and journalists and scholars, for that matter, are most weak in the knees is in their commitment to liberal values and the reason, enlightenment, and wisdom that make all of us more genuinely strong.

I've got my eye out for people who've got the stuff it takes to show real courage in the world and affirm our liberty as the core of who we are and not some backwater secret that we are ashamed and afraid of that we feel we have to keep from the world, for fear of all the evil forces that we are perpetually and wrongly afraid that freedom will unleash.

Really, how much would you have to watch freedom make the world better before you thought twice about coercion as the heart of liberal values and liberal democracy?

And that's what I like about Jim. He's got the stuff.

Mencken had the stuff. He was wrong about a lot. But this is one that he was undoubtedly right about. Because what Mencken knew better than the current crop of liberalism's wannabes is that the most important reason for presuming on the side of the freedom of each person's conscience to sort out their lives, more, is because we are so often an arrogant and petty little species far too self-righteous when we limit the liberty of others and far too often wrongheaded in that thinking to ever warrant confidence that any of us can be trusted to have somehow transcended that stupid, self-important, snotty little tendency.

I'm tired of reading pansy little excuses for why people are too sickly to take liberalism seriously. Especially from every political leader whose bread and butter is propounded in just how tough they are to deal with the world's problems.

Proof's in the pudding, you sad, small-minded little sissified nancies of illiberality. Buck up. Speak up for freedom.

If you have the stuff, that is.