Skip to main content

The Great Bob Barr fizzle

For all the proud talk of breaking 1%, of breaking 1 million votes, Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr justified his critics by pulling in (according to the tally available at this moment) just 477,000 votes.

By comparison:

Michael Badnarik 397,000 in 2004
Harry Browne 384,000 in 2000
Harry Browne 486,000 in 1996

Or, looked at another way, here's what other Libertarian candidates achieved last night:

Chris Cole (Senate, NC) 131,000 votes
Michael Munger (Governor NC) 121,000 votes
Allen Buckley (Senator GA) 121,000 votes
Yvonne Schick (Senator TX) 184,00 votes
The total for four Libertarian State candidates: 557,000 votes

There are a lot of ways to slice and dice this, but the simplest is to acknowledge some stark realities:

Bob Barr is not a Libertarian, and he got rejected by the majority of Libertarian voters.

The strength of the Libertarian movement is in its usually ignored State affiliates.

The strategy for electing freedom-oriented candidates needs to be rethought.

Oh, and--perhaps not surprisingly--(faux) Libertarian Republican has taken a lower road than even I could possibly have imagined:

Comments

Eric Dondero said…
Explain to me please how this is the "low road."

The guy is an outright Nazi. Do you not believe that he has ties to Terrorist Bill Ayers? Were Rev. Wright's comments "Goddam America" made up? Is Rashid Khalidi not Obama's friend? Do you doubt Obama's close ties to racial Anti-Semite Farakhan?

Hussein has a perfect 100 liberal/fascist voting record from the Marxist ADA.

He was endorsed by the Communist Party USA.

He had Black Panthers with batons in Philadelphia yesterday blocking polling places.

And you have the audacity to even doubt his Naziism.

You have no right to call yourself a "libertarian." You are an enemy of liberty.

Kindly cease and desist from using the libertarian label.

Immediately.
To equate Senator Obama with a genocidal, mass murderer who started a World War, and to equate tens of millions of Americans with different political beliefs with Nazi brownshirts suggests that (a) you don't have a clue what German National Socialism was all about [hint: by this point in his career Adolf Hitler had already been jailed once for an attempted coup, and his party had wracked up multiple political murders]; and that (b) you don't understand the difference between liberalism, fascism, and naziism.

Neither comes as any surprise. Having been proven dramatically wrong in believing Bob Barr would pick up over 1 million votes, your tactic now is to conflate a liberal American politician with a genocidal maniac in order to district people from the reality that the "Republican" part of your so-called Libertarianism doesn't have a clue.

Last point: nobody declared you [thankfully] the guardian of the title Libertarian; I'm inordinately pleased to be considered an "enemy of liberty" by a man with such little regard for truth or history.

Have a nice day, Eric.
Eric Dondero said…
And which tells me you don't have a clue what liberty means.

Yet you persist in calling yourself a "libertarian." That's a travesty. You should be ashamed.
Eric Dondero said…
I posted this article at LR Blog with you in mind Mr. Newton:

http://libertarianrepublican.blogspot.com/2008/11/and-for-those-who-doubt-that-obama-and.html
Unknown said…
FYI: Munger and Cole are in the same state. You double dipped on your total vote number.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?