NYT Sunday Magazine Falls Hook, Line and Sinker For Libertarians' Big Propaganda Lie

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/nyt-sunday-magazine-falls-hook-line-and-sinker-libertarians-big-propaganda-lie

On Sunday, the New York Times Magazine will be running a 7,100-word puff piece that portrays the Libertarian Party as today’s hot, new, sexy political trend that is enthralling rebellious Americans of all ages and is finally having its day in the sun.

The best-known Libertarians, such as U.S. Senator and 2016 presidential candidate, Rand Paul, are compared to dead and living rock stars. Serious, stilted and uptight mainstream Republicans sneer and snicker, and don’t quite get what’s depicted as Paul’s seemingly mystical appeal——who, we are told, dazzles even when evading simple questions.

Reason magazine editor “Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock ‘n’ roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit,” a typical passage reads. “Gillespie poured me a glass [of Green Hat gin, named for a Prohibition-era bootlegger to congressmen] and led me to a sitting area beside his office, which is festooned with vintage rock posters.”

Every few years, bored political editors and reporters announce they have discovered the next new thing. This happened when Washington Press corps rued an Al Gore presidency after tiring of Bill Clinton and peddled the line that George W. Bush was the guy you’d rather have a beer with. That same dynamic appeared in 2010, when one Washington reporter after another elevated the same old white right-wing cohort that supported Ross Perot and Richard Nixon into what they called a Tea Party “movement.”

[TransitJohn]

1. Rand Paul and his Father are Republicans.

They may be libertarians, but they're too cowardly to be Libertarians, if you follow me.

[nxylas]

2. Didn't the elder Paul once run as a Libertarian Party candidate?

Before deciding that coming bottom of the heap in Republican primaries constituted a promotion?

[HereSince1628]

4. So did David Koch...so maybe this isn't really just about Rand Paul

The media moguls have a rather greater interest in the benefits to the rich promoted under the banner of Libertarianism than they do in the pioneer-like yeoman freedoms of the common man.

[JaneyVee]

3. So "sexy" that no one puts an L next to their name.

[nxylas]

5. A little light bulb just went on above my head

I just remembered an article by KKKarl Rove that I read a few weeks back (know your enemies and all that) in which he acknowledged that elderly white racists won't sustain the Republican Party forever, and that its future lay in wooing libertarian-leaning millennials working primarily in the tech industry. Expect to see a steady stream of articles like this in the "liberal media", right up until Rand Paul formally announces his candidacy, after which the narrative will switch to how much he appeals to this new demographic they've "discovered" (with a little help from Uncle Karl).