Red County publisher Chip Hanlon likely now regrets attacking Steven Greenhut, Ron Paul and Libertarians…

Ben Franklin once said that you should never get into an argument with a man who buys ink by the barrel.  Nonetheless, Red County publisher Chip Hanlon did exactly that when he attacked not only the O.C. Register’s Steven Greenhut, but also popular Congressman Ron Paul.

Hanlon did not like a post that Greenhut wrote about U.S. militarization, but Greenhut was right.  Hanlon went on to say that the U.S. military should be “representing U.S. interests overseas.”  What does Hanlon do to pay the bills?  He is a global investments trader.  Aha!  Hanlon wants to use the U.S. military to protect his own selfish interests.  Now that is typical of the Red County Republicans!

Today, Greenhut explained his point of view regarding all of this to the Register’s 300,000 Sunday newspaper readers.  I wrote in an earlier post that Hanlon and his red-faced pals had started a war that they could not win.  Today Greenhut won it in shock and awe fashion. And wait until the Paul followers here about Chip trashing their guy…

Here are a few excerpts from his stirring rebuttal to the now very red-faced Chip Hanlon:

Quite simply, as the vanquished GOP struggles to find its voice and reach out to voters, some party activists and right-wing leaders have decided that the real problem isn’t just President Barack Obama, but the small-“l” libertarians who still remain within their midst. Local activists, writing in an establishment GOP Web site, accused me of “jumping the shark” – i.e., of no longer being relevant – because of my July 4 column that poked fun at U.S. military adventurism and the possibly illegal policies of U.S. spy agencies. But it’s not about me, really. The article, written by GOP/Red County honcho Chip Hanlon, uses my column as an example of the supposed extremism and America-hating found within the libertarian movement and takes pot shots at former GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul.

Hanlon goes for the easy straw man: “They argue – with the benefit of hindsight – that we should never have gotten involved in World War II, that Abraham Lincoln is one of history’s worst war criminals … . Their ‘philosophy’ is really pretty simple: Libertarians hate government, period, and the government they hate the most is their own. … When their full belief system is known, however, support of Libertarians like Paul cannot be defended. But folks like Paul are learning, becoming better at hiding their extremist views.”

The GOP establishmentarians mocked the (mostly calm) libertarians who commented on such mischaracterizations. One of the Republicans actually blamed libertarians for the GOP’s defeat, as if we’re the ones who had spent the last eight years abusing presidential and congressional powers. Like totalitarians, they invited us to renounce our “extremism,” make a public apology and join their cause to limit government, which is akin to a drunk calling on members of Alcoholics Anonymous to join him at the bar if they really want to fight alcoholism.

The GOP can’t claim to fight for smaller government. The Bush administration set spending records, doubled the national debt, vastly expanded Medicare entitlements and waged a costly Iraqi adventure that has caused tragic losses of life. Some of us are tired of believing empty GOP promises, and prefer to look at the dismal record. Some GOP folks claim to be critics of the Bush-era GOP excesses, but I was at the GOP convention and watched them cheer John McCain and even Karl Rove.

Since the election, the same GOP that has sung hosannas to the empty vessel of Sarah Palin has gone out of its way to depict supporters of Paul as cultlike camp followers. Unlike Palin’s acolytes, we don’t like Paul because he’s good-looking or tells folksy stories or goes moose hunting or has really cool glasses. We simply like most of the age-old ideas he espouses, as he’s one of the few national figures who still espouses them. It’s about the ideas, not the personality. Yet we’re the crazy people here?

Let’s face the obvious. Republicans in Orange County and elsewhere want us to get the hell away from their movement and to stay away. I left the GOP last year for the Libertarian Party and highly recommend it. Sure, the LP is ineffective and a bit odd, of course, but it’s better than being stuck in an unhappy marriage with a mean-spirited, abusive and angry loser of a spouse.

Maybe the Red County reaction is proof of the long-awaited and much-needed end of the old Reagan coalition, which was comprised of small-government types, social conservatives and military hawks. The GOP is still home for social conservatives and military expansionists, but there’s nothing left of value for believers in liberty. And I am so sick of all the Reagan idolatry by that side. I like Reagan, but he did, in fact, expand government. His legacy shouldn’t be off-limits to criticism.

Who are these people to dictate the political mainstream? The Red County bloggers accuse libertarians of being extremists, and used guilt-by-association tactics to smear libertarians, yet when I pointed out that one prominent writer at the blog, and someone who has joined in the “libertarians are extremists” commenting, has ties to a form of fundamentalist Christianity that wants our society run by Old Testament law, they got all huffy. He says he no longer is a Christian Reconstructionist, which is fair enough. But they miss my point: If I’m held accountable for every view by every libertarian, then they should at least be accountable for views they have expressed in the past and currently publish on their site.

I spent some time on Red County following this dust-up and found one occasional columnist arguing, “Domestically, we should rewrite our sedition law, the Smith Act, to the original 1940 standards in order to resist the attempt to establish Islamic law in America. We should follow Russia’s lead in not allowing further building of mosques or Islamic schools in America until Saudi Arabia reciprocates. … Our response to an Islamic challenge could well result in vastly expanded Christian political dominance in America. … If secular America fails to step up and recognize the incompatibility of the Islamic ideology, Christian America certainly will.”

Does re-establishing 1940s-era sedition laws and abridging religious freedom sound mainstream to you? Red County also features a diary that called for handcuffing, prosecuting and sentencing to “hard time” corporate executives who hire illegal immigrants – yet another moderate, mainstream position!

Who are these people to dictate the political mainstream? The Red County bloggers accuse libertarians of being extremists, and used guilt-by-association tactics to smear libertarians, yet when I pointed out that one prominent writer at the blog, and someone who has joined in the “libertarians are extremists” commenting, has ties to a form of fundamentalist Christianity that wants our society run by Old Testament law, they got all huffy. He says he no longer is a Christian Reconstructionist, which is fair enough. But they miss my point: If I’m held accountable for every view by every libertarian, then they should at least be accountable for views they have expressed in the past and currently publish on their site.

I spent some time on Red County following this dust-up and found one occasional columnist arguing, “Domestically, we should rewrite our sedition law, the Smith Act, to the original 1940 standards in order to resist the attempt to establish Islamic law in America. We should follow Russia’s lead in not allowing further building of mosques or Islamic schools in America until Saudi Arabia reciprocates. … Our response to an Islamic challenge could well result in vastly expanded Christian political dominance in America. … If secular America fails to step up and recognize the incompatibility of the Islamic ideology, Christian America certainly will.”

Does re-establishing 1940s-era sedition laws and abridging religious freedom sound mainstream to you? Red County also features a diary that called for handcuffing, prosecuting and sentencing to “hard time” corporate executives who hire illegal immigrants – yet another moderate, mainstream position!

Click here to read all of Greenhut’s post.

What about Ron Paul?  Politco.com recently featured him in a post about how Republicans are accepting his domestic policy ideas.  Here are a few excerpts from that post:

It’s a unique time for Paul. With the economy in the tank, the same cable news shows that spurned him during the election now keep asking him on to talk monetary policy. Republican House members are finally voting with him on spending measures.

Asked if he feels more embraced by the Republican Party establishment, Paul shrugs and says, “half and half.”

“I think there’s respect. But they don’t call me in and say, ‘What we need to find out from you is how you reach the young people.’”

As for soon-to-be departing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Paul dismisses her supporters as “more establishment, conventional Country-Club type of Republicans.”

“I wonder whether she’s energizing the 15-20 year olds,” Paul muses. “That would be a question I would have. Because she doesn’t talk about the Federal Reserve and some of these issues. She doesn’t talk too much about personal liberties, civil liberties, getting rid of drug laws, attacking the war on drugs, punishing people who torture.”

Worse still, he adds, Palinites are partisans: “If Obama was the only one who was guilty, they would be on his case all the time, but there is a lot of partisanship and I am probably less partisan and therefore she is going to appeal to partisan Republicans better.”

As Paul sees it, such partisanship is the rough equivalent of an old Onion headline, “”Our local area sports team is superior to your local area sports team,” Or as he puts it, “I think when it comes to foreign policy and monetary policy on big spending and watching out for the big corporations, Republicans are Democrats.”

And then he reverses again crediting Obama for restoring, however unintentionally, Republican principles.

“Republicans now are conservatives again” since the election, he says. “They are more consistent in voting against all these spending [measures]. And I kid them, I say, ‘are you guys voting with me now or am I voting with you?’

“Of course, they would always complain when I voted against Republican spending.“

The Campaign for Liberty, the grass-roots organization that grew out of Paul’s presidential campaign, has raised over $3 million since last June, attracting some 200,000 members.

“It just sort of baffles me,” says Paul, shrinking, as he tends to do, when the notion of his star quality is raised.

And as of last week, 271 members of the House – about one-third of them Democrats – have signed onto HR-1207; a measure Paul introduced last February to audit the Federal Reserve.