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One of the main reasons I read Australian Libertarian blogs....

... is that they usually make a lot of sense.

Real World Libertarian has two recent posts that are a case in point.

Jim first points out that all the arch-conservative anti-McCain hoopla doesn't make much sense from where he sits, even if (or especially if) the subject is immigration:

Well I am going to disappoint and upset most of my US friends on the net and support McCain, a difficult decision, but one, which had to be made in the face of the ANCIR and other racist groups attack on him.

Sure immigration is a difficult issue to deal with and some hard decisions have to be made, especially in view of the sheer numbers of illegals in the US. However when I see calls for all of them to be booted out immediately, it becomes obvious that many of the proponents come from La La Land or somewhere close to it.

The sheer impractability of it is breathtaking in its stupidity. Just how the hell do you take 12 million people out of a country in a period as short as six months as some advocate and toss them into another, with out causing disastrous consequences both economically and socially is beyond me.


Next, in A Call for a Positive Campaign, Jim gets frustrated over the amount of negative campaigning that takes place even before we get to the general election:

One of the problems I see with the campaign on our side of politics is the extreme amount of negativity I am seeing, especially with such things as the ‘Dump McCain Now’ symbol on blogs. I am not being one eyed here as I felt that the Rudy one which is disappearing now was also a bad idea.

If I were a Democrat, (give me a minute to wash my mouth out) I would collect all of these for use later on.


He draws on an Australian example to cite where this leads [as you read, remember that Down Under the Liberal candidate equates with our Conservatives]:

I am reminded by all of this of an election in Australia around the late 70s where the Liberal Party with Malcolm Frazer as PM was up against Labor with Gough Whitlam as opposition leader. Both sides stank in the eyes of all but their most sycophantic followers, to the point where about the only thing they could do to look good was to talk about the other side.

This lead to the bizarre phenomenon where all Liberal Party advertising was headed with a photograph of Gough, while all Labor adds were headed by a photo of Frazer. To avoid keeping you in suspense, the Liberal party had deeper pockets and was able to print more photos of Gough than Labor could of Frazer, and so won the election.

I hope we can do better.


Me, too.
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