There’s an interesting little item in the Village Voice about questions concerning Cliff Baxter’s demise. He was the Enron executive who ostensibly committed suicide, but according to this report, he was talking about hiring a body guard shortly before his death–a behavior more consistent with later homicide than suicide.

But what I found most interesting were these words:

Those who doubt the official line think he’s another Vince Foster, murdered in cold blood to stop him from spilling the beans on Enron chief Ken Lay and blowing open the whole scam?offshore accounts, political connections, and all.

The title of the piece contains Foster’s name as well. He says it as though it’s established fact that Foster was murdered. Gee, while the Village Voice is hardly mainstream media, I thought that it was only “right-wing nuts” who have suspicions about the circumstances of Mr. Foster’s strange departure from this world.

Now that Mr. Starr has long departed from the prosecutorial scene, Mr. Ray has submitted his final report, and the Clinton’s have been out of office and power for over a year, I wonder if we’re going to start to see cracks appear in the official story on Foster?

If either Clinton, or even a Clinton or Rodham relative get indicted and/or convicted for the pardon mess, we may see the floodgates start to burst here.

At The Nation, the eternally loathesome Eric Alter writes:

Now Sullivan has launched a career in the brave new world of “blogging,” or vanity websites. And while his site arouses a certain gruesome car-wreck fascination, it serves primarily as a reminder to writers of why we need editors.

Well, certainly Mr. Alterman is the poster child for that concern. Maybe Katrina, Victor and David Corn were all on vacation this week. Or maybe the editors need editors…

Apparently, that public opinion survey done in the Islamic world was dramatically misreported.

These eye-opening results were “actually the average for the countries surveyed regardless of the size of their populations,” the NCPP noted. “Kuwait, with less than 2 million Muslims, was treated the same as Indonesia, which has over 200 million Muslims.”

That’s Enron arithmetic. It’s as if California and South Dakota each were granted the same number of electoral votes in presidential elections.

Also, apparently the Kuwait numbers weren’t of Kuwaiti citizens:

One other problem: not everyone interviewed for the poll was Muslim. “The surveys were samples of all residents of the countries surveyed, not only Muslims,” the NCPP statement read. (In hindsight, this probably was a minor problem: fewer than 500 of the 9,924 respondents were non-Muslim, according to Gallup.)

In fact, you didn’t need to be a citizen of the country where the interviews were conducted. For example, fewer than half of the individuals in the Kuwait sample were Kuwaiti citizens.

So who were they? Saudis? Palestinians?

While the correct numbers still give a grim picture of Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. (much of which is fomented by a government-controlled press), it doesn’t speak well for this much-vaunted polling organization.

My, I seem to have lit a small conflagration.

Will Wilkinson says (among other things):

For all I know, Rand may have the political calculus right: the net loss to liberty is smaller under Republicans. But this really just misses the point.

Well, no. I think that it’s Will who’s missing the point. My point was not that this kind of stuff doesn’t dissuade freedom-seeking voters–it clearly does. My only point was that, given the available options, it shouldn’t. He (and Glenn) are discussing “is.” I’m discussing “ought.”

If it’s the case that the Republicans are on the whole better for liberty, then Rand should be very concerned that Republicans aren’t associated in the popular imagination with obnoxious, unappealing, totalitarian lifestyle philosophies.

I never said that I wasn’t concerned about it, and I’m certainly not defending Ashcroft–I think that he’s an ass. I am concerned about it, but it does no good for me to simply be concerned about it.

I wish that all Republicans, or all Democrats, or all of both parties, would overnight become libertarian. But wishes aren’t horses, so I’ll have to keep on walking. All that I can try to do is assuage other’s (IMHO, mistaken) concerns about the bedroom police if Republicans take over the government.

Most people aren’t as bright as Rand, and they aren’t very interested in determining what political program is really in their best interests. What people are interested in is a sense of identity. If a party grates against our sense of the kind of person we’d like to be, then we don’t want anything to do with it.

Which is why we have a responsibility to continue to propogate anti-idiotarianism (to the best of our limited abilities), so that either the Republican Party will grate less, or people will vote in a more rational manner.

For me, effective socialists grate far more than bumbling moralists. Again, Will purports to speak for all these nameless others, but I sense that he’s really speaking for himself as well (since he used the pronoun “our”). He’d apparently really rather vote for (or at least “identify with”) people who will rob him blind, as long as they’ll get down and party with him (though I understand from other posts on his site that he doesn’t vote at all).

It’s not just the Taxman, Will. It’s the guy who doesn’t let you drain a mud puddle because it’s a wetland. It’s a public-school principal who will let your kid die of asthma rather than let her keep her inhaler. It’s the corrupt politician who will consign inner-city kids to an illiterate hell in order to satisfy the teacher’s unions.

For all of his idiocy, has Ashcroft been worse for civil rights than Janet Reno? Ask the barbecued kids in Waco. Ask Elian.

What I’m saying is that this is at least partly, if not mostly, a perception problem (and Will and Glenn seem to agree in their commentary). Well, then part of the solution is to change the perception. That was the point of my post.