Bob Barr, Libertarian?

Really? Bob Barr???

At the Libertarian Party's convention in Denver today, the party selected Bob Barr as its presidential nominee. Yes, this is the same Bob Barr who used to be a Republican congressman from Georgia. He was elected to Congress in the spittle wave of 1994 and made an embarrassing spectacle of himself throughout his 8 years in office.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all this is that - unless he's had some great political epiphany - Barr, now 59, isn't even close to being a small-l libertarian. Or a big-L Libertarian. The Libertarian Party even ran ads against Barr in his ill-fated 2002 congressional campaign because he was such a defiant backer of the failed War on Drugs. Barr even blocked a voter initiative that would have legalized medical marijuana in the District of Columbia, and he barred the vote tally from being made public. (It was later discovered that D.C. voters had approved medical marijuana with a staggering 69% of the vote.) Barr supported the Patriot Act too, and wanted the Pentagon to ban the Wiccan religion.

After leaving Congress, Bob Barr reversed his Patriot Act position and wanted to abolish his own law against medical marijuana. But it seems too little, too late. Maybe he has turned over a new leaf, but he was so right-wing while he was in Congress that it takes a lot of repenting to overcome that record. The Last Word used to rip into this guy so mercilessly that I can't imagine ever voting for him even if he abandoned his most odiferous stances.

What's really amusing is that Barr's candidacy could be a spoiler that dooms the McCain campaign. Remember, Bob Barr actually did build up a following (for what it was worth), and I'm sure he has followers who are just going to abandon McCain now.

(Source: http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2008/05/barr-is-liberta.html)