Yes I’m about a week late on this, but I was thinking the other day about how one of the odder things about the Libertarian Party convention in Denver was the fact that Jim Pinkerton was selected to moderate the C-SPAN televised debate.

Pinkerton was most recently a “senior advisor” to Mike Huckabee’s campaign. Huckabee, with his combination of economic populism, nanny-state paternalism, and Christian Right moralism - is perhaps as far from Libertarian as one can get.

This description of Pinkerton seems (as far as I can tell) to be a relatively fair assessment:

Pinkerton is a quirky, independent-minded, and affable conservative… He proudly wears the paleocon badge, and he has been against the Iraq war from the start, blasting away at the neocons and their imperial ambitions. He’s a fierce hawk on immigration. No fence is too big or too large for him. He has railed repeatedly [on bhTV] that elites… just don’t get it–the “it” being the supposed widespread and deep popular anger about illegal immigrants. He’s also a utopian advocate of space exploration.

Clearly a mixed bag, although any establishment conservative who has opposed the war in Iraq deserves some credit.

But then, he also has proposed putting police in front of every mosque in America.

And the degree to which he actually opposes the war is put into some doubt with quotes lie this: “I’d rather lose our civil liberties than lose the war.”

Ultimately it doesn’t bother me that much - for one thing it isn’t my party, and further he is journalist who until he became a Huck adviser had a regular column in Newsday - but it surely did seem odd.