Poor little Jamie Kirchick: it can’t be easy being a known lickspittle and liar. This Norman Podhoretz-wannabe is stamping his foot and having a real hissy fit over The American Conservative‘s endorsement of Ron Paul for President. Don’t they know that “respectable libertarians like the writers at Reason magazine and the Cato Institute almost immediately disassociated themselves from the fringe presidential candidate and his works”? Don’t they know that he, Jamie Kirchick, gets to decide who’s “respectable” and who’s the intellectual equivalent of a trailer park resident?

As Jacob Heilbrunn points out in his new book, the neocons—obsessed as they are with status and their own outsider-dom—aspire to be the grand arbiters of social respectability. Someone like Paul, whose appeal is to populist conservatives who hate the Federal Reserve as well as to those who want to legalize their vices, is well outside the Veil of Respectability, at least according to Kirchickian lights. Yet Kirchick’s interdict consigning Paul to “the fever swamps” may not be universally recognized outside the editorial offices of TNR and the Weekly Standard.

The New Republic‘s big mistake was posting the original newsletters, which show the supposedly “racist” and “homophobic” remarks in context: they should’ve simply quoted selectively and left it to Paul’s defenders to look up the originals. Because, by now, anyone who cares about this tempest in a teapot has long since read the newsletters for themselves, and, if they’re normal everyday anti-PC conservatives, saw very little that was “racist” or even all that horribly offensive. The mud isn’t sticking—except amongst the few Kirchickians in the world and the even fewer “cosmopolitan” libertarians over at Reason and Cato.

Masochist that I am, I took on the task of comparing what Kirchick wrote about the newsletters to the actual text, and showed him up for the lying little c*cksucker that he is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but, of all the accusations Kirchick levels against Paul, the charge of “homophobia” really takes the cake—and it’s clearly the one that energizes his obvious hatred, aside from Paul’s foreign policy positions.

Paul, a medical doctor, is no homophobe: I know that from personal experience, as an openly “gay” guy who has known Paul since the late 1970s. Kirchick whines that the newsletter included a comment to the effect that gays were better off in the closet, rather than “out” as they are today: and yet he, Kirchick, is the perfect example of why this is so. Because every time some whiney little faggot screeches that someone is a “homophobe” on the basis of mere political disagreement, it represents an acute embarrassment to all of us “out” gays who are, shall we say, less sssssssssensitive. Looking at Kirchick’s antics, I feel very much the way any black conservative must feel watching the Rev. Al Sharpton go through his paces. In short, we’d all be a lot better off if gay twinks-with-little-brains like Kirchick had stayed in the closet—and spared us the sight of so much concentrated malevolence.

It must please our “cosmo-libertarians” to no end to see that they have met the Kirchickian standard of excellence, and have been officially promoted to the ranks of the Respectable Libertarians—although, if I were them, I’d be real careful from now on. Life won’t be easy toeing a line set down by Kirchick’s two bosses—TNR’s Peretz and Commentary‘s Poddy, Jr.—but I’m sure the obliging folks at Reason and Cato will do a good job trying. And in the meantime, it must be doing wonders for their fundraising among libertarians that they are now known as the anti-Ron Paul faction of the movement, and that everyone else is a gap-toothed bigot only a few notches above Tim McVeigh. Oh well, perhaps one of the big neocon foundations could set up a grant—yes, come to think of it, I’m sure it could be arranged ….