Among the many symptoms of today’s moral bankruptcy, the performance of the so-called “moderates” at the Republican National Convention was the climax, at least to date. It was an attempt to institutionalize smears as an instrument of national policy—to raise those smears from the private gutters of yellow journalism to the public summit of a proposed inclusion in a political party platform. The “moderates” were demanding a repudiation of “extremism” without any definition of that term.

 Ignoring repeated challenges to define what they meant by “extremism,” substituting vituperation for identification, they kept the debate on the level of concretes and would not name the wider abstractions or principles involved. 

The "extreme social conservatives" apparently believe that homosexuals living together are not "married" and that life begins at conception. 

I think that most Americans would agree with those - or at least agree that the answers are not easy to find agreement on.  And that is my point.  These are not "extreme" ideological positions.  I am disappointed that Ed Hudgins would fall into such an error, given the canonical nature of Ayn Rand's essay "Extremism or the Art of Smearing" (1964).

On another topic:

Fred wrote about The Iron Lady: " In her battle with the coal unions, she -instructed- the subsidized national UK science community to find a linkage damning the use of coal and promoting the use of nuclear in the UK..."

Margaret Thatcher's undergraduate degree was in chemistry.  She knew her science. And coal has long been associated with public health problems not associated with nuclear.  But your wider point is valid: all for the free market, she was also all for whatever means suited her goals.  Like Reagan, she was laudable on many grounds, but also like Reagan, not someone to whom an Objectivist would grant a blank check moral sanction.

The USSR would have collapsed sooner or later and only collapsed later when we stopped propping it up.  I am reading now The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris. Forget Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs: the Russians were loading Lend Lease transport planes with boxes of copies of papers on "nuclear" this and "atomic" that. Ferris is not an Objectivist and much of his nice writing rings hollow for missing the very truth that Ayn Rand articulated so well about capitalism and intellectual freedom.  (Ferris favors "liberal democracy.")  However, he explodes the myths of Nazi German and Soviet Russian superiority in technology and science by provided an overwhelming body of facts. 
 Objecttivists who can quote chapter and verse know the idea of the "muscle-mystic" but then, as in this topic, claim that the USSR had thousands of missiles pointing at us.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 4/09, 12:47pm)