The National Review has discovered the most comical of ways to celebrate our nation's holy day, Halloween: Writing a special Halloween-themed column about how liberals are pussies! "How to Scare a Liberal to Death," is the column from real person "H.W. Crocker III," who's put together a list of the best old-timey aristocratic conservative costumes to scare your precious liberal friends.

"Nothing offends liberals more than colonialism," Crocker writes, "So, what better costumes to don for Halloween than those of great British imperialists throughout the centuries?" Already we're having difficulty squaring this idea, that the British imperialists are liberals' worst nightmares, with the fact that American conservatism has propelled itself through the last few years by fetishizing the spirit of the Revolutionary War — fought against the authoritarian British Empire! — as the most important emancipatory struggle in human history. But nevermind that! Let's look at some of Mr. Crocker's favorites from this love letter to the British Empire, and its old regime ways.

First off, what about dressing up as Sir Henry Morgan? Today better known as the "Captain Morgan" of the popular spiced rum, Morgan was a patriot pirate who was eventually knighted and made deputy governor of Jamaica. Pirates are always popular at Halloween, and Morgan would have been the terror of liberal health and safety bureaucrats today. He did not, as the saying goes, "drink responsibly." He ate capaciously, without any regard to the recommendations of the surgeon general. And as for occupational safety, his men once accidentally blew up their own ship during New Year's revels.

If you're a liberal, you definitely pooped your pants reading that! Liberals hate to imagine that a 17th century man would drink lots of alcohol, eat lots of food, and destroy his own large capital investments, in defiance of 20th century bureaucratic recommendations.

Then, Sir Richard Francis Burton!

Burton was a soldier, secret agent, diplomat, linguist par excellence, prolific author, and explorer who searched for the source of the Nile and penetrated Mecca disguised as a Muslim (the penalty for that, if he was exposed, was death). He was also a thoroughgoing patriot. Of the Amazons of Dahomey, he wrote that they "were mostly elderly and all of them hideous. The officers were decidedly chosen for the size of their bottoms. . . . They maneuver with the precision of a flock of sheep. . . . An equal number of British charwomen, armed with the British broomstick would . . . clear them off in a very few hours."

Liberals are terrified of this most noble display of patriotism, making fat jokes. Next:

[Field Marshal Sir Gerald] Templer was the man who gave us the "hearts and minds" strategy for defeating Communist insurgents, which the British used successfully in Malaya.

And American liberals still haven't thanked him for giving us this wonderful strategy, even after it was deployed so successfully in Vietnam. Next:

Or perhaps one might prefer to play General Sir Charles Napier... Aside from his personal heroism - and that of his family, for they were a military lot - what most endears him to conservatives is his campaign to put down the Hindu tradition of widow-burning, immortalized in these famous lines: "This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to our national customs."

Oh, OHHHH, this is the asshole who stopped letting people burn widows? This guy? Liberals are gonna have some major problems with this guy. They love burning widows almost as much as they love the surgeon general's alcohol consumption recommendations.

We can't wait to read the next Halloween-themed political column!

[via Wonkette; graphic of "Morgan's Attack on the Town of Portobelo" via]