There was an article in the Atlanta paper over the weekend about a PAC operated by Bob Barr, currently running for the Libertarian Party nomination for President. It turns out that the percentage of donations to his PAC that have actually gone to GOP political candidates (the stated purpose of the PAC in fundraising letters) is 3%. The rest goes to “administrative expenses” (read: Bob Barr) and more fundraising. This isn’t too surprising.
Bob Barr is Rudy Giuliani minus the name recognition, the charisma and any residual sense of human decency.
Like Giuliani, Barr started out as a publicity-chasing federal prosecutor. During the 80’s it was said (ok, mostly by me) that the most dangerous place in Atlanta was between Bob Barr and a TV camera. He later ran for Congress, where he became known as the surliest of the right-wing lunatics brought in during the 1994 GOP takeover. He was virulently anti-gay and anti-abortion. He was a true-believer in the War on Drugs, fighting to ban medical marijuana at the federal level. He proposed that the Wiccan religion be banned in the military. He was probably best known as a prosecutor in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, and in fact loudly advocated Clinton’s impeachment before the Lewinsky affair.
Well it turns out that Barr had a few problems of his own. For example, on the whole abortion thing — his wife had one that he paid for. He was on his third wife, having cheated on at least one of them, and having failed to provide child support for two of them. Photos surfaced of him licking whipped cream off a stripper’s breasts. And there was an incident when he accidentally discharged a pistol he was handling at a fundraising event. He claimed it must have had a hair trigger. You just can’t make this stuff up.
The most amazing thing this gigantic hypocrite did, however, was to sue Larry Flynt (whose investigators had turned up proof of the affairs and the abortion) for $30 million for infliction of emotional suffering, while simultaneously supporting a tort reform bill to limit emotional suffering awards to $250,000. The suit was thrown out on the entirely reasonable basis that the accusations were true.
In 2002 the Democrats who still controlled the Georgia Legislature redestricted him out of Congress. He was forced to run against another incumbent Republican, John Linder. The good people of the north Atlanta suburbs sensibly chose the Republican who did not actually ooze slime before their eyes.
Now Bob has apparently concluded that his career in the GOP is over, and he has become a libertarian. A guy who built his career putting people away for victimless crimes, making it the federal government’s business who you marry, inserting the government into reproductive decisions and trying to tell men and women serving their country what religion they can observe*, has suddenly seen the light of personal freedom. It’s not often a 60-year-old man repudiates his entire life’s work, but slime is nothing if not flexible.
And yet the Libertarian party may actually nominate him. I sympathize with a lot of libertarian (small “l”) views, but the Libertarian Party in practice seems to be made up mainly of tax dodgers, gun nuts and assorted tinfoil hat types. Can even that pack of losers be stupid enough to fall for this guy? Stay tuned. I think their convention is in a few days.
*Barr, though of prime age to have served in Vietnam, evidently used educational deferments to avoid service. But you probably could have guessed that, as personal cowardice is de rigueur among right-wingnuts.
