Sunday, September 07, 2008

The unbearable lightness of being the Libertarian National Committee

The current LNC is the culmination of a corollary to the Peter Principle: Any group largely composed of people who have been promoted beyond their level of competence will, over time, invest an increasingly large portion of its collective efforts to concealing the fact that it is largely so composed.

Stalin and Vyshinsky and Beria were at least the real thing: When they accused someone of secretly conspiring with Trotsky to wreck the pulp-separating machine and burn out the light bulbs and plug the toilets at some paper mill in Yakutsk, that someone could count on an all-expenses-paid trip to the gulag or at least a short walk to the basement of the Lubyanka and a bullet in the back of the grape.

Starr and Sullentrup and Carling? Um, no. They're just cats trying to hide the fact that they missed the litter box again. If throwing the stuff at the wall to see if it any of it sticks seems like an odd way of accomplishing that, well, remember ... we're talking about people operating far, far beyond that old level of competence thingamajig here.

I've just been upbraided by my significant other for insulting cats. Duly noted.

The LNC is in what many have called a "lifeboat situation" now. If it wants to survive (or, rather, retain its position as the organizational management team of a national political party), it's going to have to throw some dead weight over the side. Offhand, that dead weight would include Redpath, Sullentrup and Starr. As for Carling, I don't really know if it's feasible to scrape barnacles from the hull while under weigh, but it's worth looking into.

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