The American Lenin: 197th Birthday
L. Neil Smith - since the switch many years ago from celebrating Lincoln's birthday on February 12 and Washington's birthday on February 22 to some Monday between the two, it has become easy to forget the individual birthdays. So I forgot to remind you yesterday of the birthday of one of the worst tyrants in American history. Oh well. It's still a good time to re-read this classic essay.
It's harder and harder these days to tell a liberal from a conservative -- given the former category's increasingly blatant hostility toward the First Amendment, and the latter's prissy new disdain for the Second Amendment -- but it's still easy to tell a liberal from a libertarian.
Just ask about either Amendment.
If what you get back is a spirited defense of the ideas of this country's Founding Fathers, what you've got is a libertarian. By shameful default, libertarians have become America's last and only reliable stewards of the Bill of Rights.
But if -- and this usually seems a bit more difficult to most people -- you'd like to know whether an individual is a libertarian or a conservative, ask about Abraham Lincoln.