Refusing to Defend Treason in Defense of Slavery

UPDATE BELOW

Don't confuse neo-confederate treason apologists like Rand Paul with libertarians. And don't expect to ever hear from the Tribble-Toupeed One a full-throated condemnation of the confederacy like this:

Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly:

But at least one libertarian-oriented writer, the Cato Institute’s Jason Kuznicki, is fed up, and writes eloquently at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about the tendency of the Pauls and their allies to coddle if not conspire with friends of the Lost Cause:

I will certainly stop thinking of Rand Paul as the “good” Paul, the one who was over all that bad, old, racist, secessionist nonsense. Very obviously, he’s just fine with all that. He can’t not be fine with it. He must both know about it and tolerate it. The association here seems a good deal stronger, if anything, than the one between the elder Paul and his neo-Confederate associates.

I do not have to tolerate this stuff, and I won’t. Rand Paul has always insisted that he was a conservative, not a libertarian, and I’d sometimes tried to say, “Well, yeah, but he kind of really is a libertarian. Sort of.” From now on, the conservatives can have him, and they will hear no objections from me. Take him, he’s yours….

Anyone who cares about human liberty — to whatever degree — ought to despise the Confederacy, ought to mock and desecrate its symbols, and ought never to let Confederate apologists pass unchallenged.

Those who make excuses for the Confederacy are at best ignorant, and even that ignorance is hard to fathom. Those who wave the Confederate flag just to make other people angry? Well, I get angry at them. It works every time, and I’m not even a little ashamed of it.

All friends of the Confederacy are my enemies. Wherever they appear. They’re your enemies too — they are the enemies of the entire human race — and the only remaining question is whether you face up to your responsibility as a human being and disown them.

That's patriotism.

UPDATE:

No surprise that AynRandy Is out, proud and loud for his neo-confederate staffer.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

Look, as recently as 2009, Hunter was defending the Confederacy and secession in print. In 2010, he co-wrote Paul's first book.

Is it sensible to cut people some slack on youthful indiscretions? Of course. But Hunter wasn't some random high-school student flirting with radical ideas on the political fringe; he was arguing in support of secession and the Confederacy as a 34-year-old adult professional, and a year later, he was on Rand Paul's payroll.

Dave Weigel has argued, persuasively, that this story won't hurt Paul on the right, and I suspect that's correct. But for the mainstream, there's no reason Rand Paul's "youthful" defense of his Confederate staffer should be taken seriously.