To read the supposedly “libertarian” bloggers over at the Cato Institute’s “Cato@Liberty” site and Reason‘s “Hit and Run,” you’d never know there’s a war on: an unjust, horribly expensive, terrorist-creating war that tears at the conscience of the nation and is now “surging” toward an open conlict with Iran. Here it is Monday morning, and already we’ve got 5 US troops killed by Sunni guerrillas (are these the same Sunnis we’re allied with in Anbar and Diyala provinces?), an intra-Shi’ite civil war is about to break out, and the leader of the Sunnis in Parliament is accusing the Shi’ite-led government of engaging in “genocide” against his co-religionists. In the drug-induced haze of the “libertarian” perspective, however, on display over at Reason and Cato, all we have is an attack on the Pope, a defense of pornography, an inquiry into lying about sex (do men do it, do women? Yawn!), and—oh, wait! Here‘s a very short post by Justin Logan, over at the Cato blog, that deals with the Iraq war—but you really have to look for it, lost as it is amongst the paeans to the virtues of drugs, porn, and tax cuts for billionaires and cash-heavy drug companies. As for Reason: nary a word about Iraq. For news about the most important story in the headlines, you have to go over to the leftist Juan Cole‘s site.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the same movement as these people, who seem to have no moral sense—indeed, no sense at all.