This sort of crap right here is what really burns my butt.

Via Reason’s Hit and Run Blog:

The specter of “paranoid libertarianism” continues to haunt American liberals. Hot on the heels of Sean Wilentz’s recent fretting in The New Republic that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange have undermined the case for big government by drawing too much attention to various instances of big government malfeasance, former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein has now weighed in with his own contribution to the genre, an op-ed titled “How to Spot a Paranoid Libertarian.”

According to Sunstein, paranoid libertarianism is characterized by such pathologies as “a presumption of bad faith on the part of government officials–a belief that their motivations must be distrusted,” as well as “a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value, and that it is unreasonable and weak to see relevant considerations on both sides.”

Sunstein tries very hard to make that sound like dangerous and exotic stuff, but in fact what he’s really describing is mainstream American jurisprudence when it comes to such vast areas of the law as free speech, voting, abortion, privacy, and gay rights. In those areas, our judicial system basically operates exactly as Sunstein describes: it subjects government regulations to what lawyers call strict (or intermediate) scrutiny. In essence, judges presume that the government has acted illegitimately when it legislates in such areas, and therefore forces the government to shoulder the burden of proof and justify its actions with extremely convincing rationales. Why do the courts place these government actions under the microscope? To protect the people’s liberty to speak, vote, associate, and enjoy various forms of privacy. One more thing: American liberals overwhelmingly favor this approach in such cases.

Politically, I consider myself a paleoconservative, rather than a libertarian. However, I do harbor a deep mistrust of my Government; and I have since 9/11. My mistrust of the Government proceeded Barack Obama. I was one of the wise people, who knew for a fact, that absolutely nothing would change in Government, with a change of political parties.

So, Cass Sunstein can take his or her, (I don’t know which) condescending, elitist, attitude towards those of us who still believe in civil rights, liberty and the Constitution of the United States of America and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine! 😡

As the writer I quoted above said, much of what this Sunstein, which sounds like a Jewish last name, by the way —- is disparaging, is a staple among liberals, who actually care about such things, such as civil rights and the like. Funny how that works, isn’t it? How ironic is it, that some immigrant from a nation of jewelers would take a swipe at true American values, such as liberty.

It is this sort of idiocy, that fuels people like David Duke and his ilk; and rightfully so. What more can one expect from the same group of people, who put the Savour of this World, The Lord Jesus Christ on the cross?