In the Interest of Political Balance...

…on this potentially-decisive Super Duper Tuesday, I should not let my glowing post about John Derbyshire’s dog be today’s only entry (he is only one of our two, politically-balanced speakers tomorrow night at Lolita Bar, the other being Seth Colter Walls). So, here are a few notes to make things a little less right-wing around here:

•Derb doesn’t believe in human Heaven and so surely does not believe in Doggy Heaven, but as a cultural conservative in so many other ways, neither, I suspect, does he believe in the gayest alternate reality of all: Planet Unicorn (brought to my attention by Marcia Baczynski) [UPDATE 2/7/08: At last night's debate, Derb said he is not an atheist].

•I cannot decide whether Groundhog Day, which was this past Saturday, more closely resembles Christ’s purported resurrection after days in the ground or Nietzsche’s neo-pagan conception of the “eternal return,” though I may be confusing Punxsutawney Phil with Bill Murray. I’m not going to let it nag at me, though. (I love the fact that the official Punxsutawney Phil website unhesitatingly claims he has a 100% accuracy rate and is really the original, very long-lived Punxsutawney Phil — the sort of claims inherently funny to a skeptic but perhaps plausible to religious folk, who believe even stranger things.)

•My scientist boss (herself married to a Catholic) recently took the Catholic Church to task for ostensibly being “pro-life” yet showing little interest in using its powers of moral persuasion (always preferable to regulation, which is brute force) to get billions of people to stop shortening their lives through cigarette smoking.

•One of my fellow libertarians says she’s neither voting for a Republican in the primary nor waiting to vote at the Libertarian convention but rather voting in the Democratic primary for Obama, mostly to stick it to Hillary (I guess that’s sort of right-wing, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it, and I sympathize — indeed, I plan to wear my anti-Hillary “Re-defeat Communism in 2008” t-shirt tomorrow night at Lolita, just for fun and because at least some of the Democrats present will probably be Obama supporters and thus sympathize with me a little bit, even if I am stepping a bit outside my neutral host role; the crowd will get over it).

And on a more blatantly (though not complacently) right-wing note:

By the time you see this, it is certain that I will have made some terrible mistake at the polls in the New York primary — I don’t see any correct choice, having watched Paul, Thompson, and Giuliani all deservedly fizzle. But I think I’ll set a strategic rather than philosophically-pure example, casting the only remaining useful protest-vote left available to me by voting for somewhat fiscally-oriented Romney against ideologically-unreliable “maverick” John McCain, who admits he doesn’t understand economics and doesn’t much seem to care. And judging by the close polls in California, maybe I’m even backing a winner at last, though the odds are against him.

It wasn’t easy to decide whether I wanted to spend the next few months explaining and apologizing for a Romney vote or just saying the hell with it, going back to my original favorite from months ago, and spending the next few months explaining and apologizing for a Paul vote. But the thought of potentially dealing with happy Obama voters as they watch him enter the White House next year and ask me how I could have voted for the guy whose old newsletters sound like Klan tracts was simply too embarrassing in the end. But libertarians can and will do better in the future, if the republic survives in the interim.

Here’s hoping for divided conventions for all parties, by the way, just to keep things interesting — though this year makes you wonder whether more options are necessarily better options, unlibertarian as that may sound.