Über Alec, Barking-Mad Bashir & The Death-Defying Libertarians

By Ilana Mercer

In 2007, this column backed actor Alec Baldwin following the "tirade" he unleashed on Ireland, his then 11-year-old daughter.

Six years on, conservative columnist Ann Coulter has experienced her libertarian moment. Last week, she declared: "I’m with Alec Baldwin on punching aggressive paparazzi photographers. I’m with him against the word police. I’m with him on the stalker. I’m with him on using an electronic device on a plane before takeoff. I’m with him on Kim Basinger playing visitation games with their daughter."

What are conservatives doing demanding Baldwin’s head for calling some pestilential paparazzi a “c**k-s**king little f*g.” It is perfectly obvious Baldwin was just cursing the guy out with whatever bad words popped into his head, not engaging in “homophobia” against an actual gay person.

What Sally-come-lately has exhorted of late about Alec Baldwin ought to be uncontroversial in conservative circles.

Back in 2007, the same Idiocracy now braying for Baldwin's blood was flapping like black crows over the actor, insisting that words are as bad as bruises, and that he ought to have been arrested or slapped with a restraining order. As if this dad's access to his kid were not already severely restricted in the course of a rancorous divorce.

What are the chances that Alec Baldwin’s daughter is a “rude, thoughtless little pig"?, I wrote in April of that year.

Since so many of America’s kids and all of Hollywood adults and their little hogs fit the description—I surmised that Baldwin was on the money.

What is the likelihood that the family courts in this country had denied the actor his legal custodial rights?

Given the family court system’s stellar record in railroading an overwhelming majority of petitioning dads, I ventured that Baldwin’s case against the courts was as credible as his case against his daughter’s misconduct.

Back in 2007, I also wagered that the incriminating recording of the actor verbally disciplining his inconsiderate daughter, long-distance, was likely leaked to the media by the "little pig" herself.

Baldwin is an intense, well-spoken individual. Fired up as he was about the compromised legal rights of divorced dads, he would have made an effective spokesman for this cause.

The actor is now blasting "the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy—Rich Ferraro and Andrew Sullivan"—and has come close to doing the same to MSNBC host Martin Bashir. Unlike Baldwin, Bashir has kept his job with the network because he merely cussed a conservative.

An English import, the barking-mad Bashir cursed former Governor Sarah Palin on air for daring to liken "borrowing from China to pay for the national debt" to slavery.

In response, "big-league scold" Howard Kurtz, now at Fox News, ruled that "the issue on which [Bashir] went after the former Alaska governor and Fox News contributor is fair game."

Nonsense on stilts. Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language. The word slavery does not "belong" to blacks.

Sarah Palin used a perfectly good noun—slavery—to denote the bondage that trillions in government debt imposes on citizens.

BLACKOUT. “Phony panic” and “urban myth” is how the "prestige press" is characterizing widespread reports of en masse, black-on-white Knock-Out attacks. "Boys behaving badly," noodled one jocular Democratic strategist about the sucker-punching to death of a few people, so far.

The mischief-makers must be laughing. They couldn't care a fig. In fact, the rhetorical reprisals the perpetrators deploy to define their crimes are as precise as the blows they land on their pale victims: “polarbearing,” Jew hunting and so on.

But some libertarians were having none of it, insisting à la the left, that to frame the felons in anything but race-neutral terms is collectivist and racist.

In the face of such dogged denial, I worry that libertarians who reject reality may be doomed to extinction.

Picture this: You walk past a feral gang of black youths, like the ones depicted in all these terrifying YouTube clips. You grin bravely, place honky hands on ears and hum loudly as you saunter by, until... you are coshed on the head by a black youth. Then another. And another.

As you fall to your knees near death, you congratulate yourself on cleaving not to reality, but to a noble "theory" instead. You die a happy, theoretically pious libertarian.

It must be abundantly clear to any thinking man that this is idiotic, not individualistic.

Those who're derided as apostles of intolerance—"collectivists"—for cleaving to reality will likely outlive the self-sacrificing, self-styled individualists, sacrificed to an idea that has no basis in objective reality