This country is truly blessed with brilliant law professors, and Glenn Reynolds may not even be the brightest. Here’s David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy:
Ron Paul is a tempting protest vote, and I did support him in 1988 when he ran as a Libertarian, but he strikes me as running less of a “libertarian” campaign than a pacifist, populist campaign that does have some appeal to young and idealistic libertarians, but has too much appeal to the old, paranoid, and racist pseudo-conservatives. There seems to be a right-wing version of the Popular Front mentality among many Paul supporters: just like it was okay for Social Democrats to ally with Stalinists for “Progressive” ends in the old days, it’s okay to ally with 9/11 and various other conspiracy theorists, southern secessionists, Nazis and fascists, anti-Semites and racists, against the common enemy of the modern “welfare-warfare” state. Count me out!
I know, right? I’ve always felt that the worst thing about Nazis was their opposition to war and statism.
UPDATE: Bernstein says that we’re not Nazis “whew, that’s a relief!“ but we’re “not going to be winning any awards from the ADL or NAACP any time soon, either.” I don’t get the NAACP reference – guess Bernstein was too embarrassed to just leave it at the ADL. By the way, how many ADL trophies has the Volokh Conspiracy received, since that’s apparently the measure of one’s non-anti-Semitism?