Just because my friends at Delawareliberal might miss this. . . .

. . . (and I am being utterly serious here).

In all the furor over Bob Barr's announcement yesterday that he is seeking the Libertarian presidential nomination, there is an aspect of this whole story that non-Libertarians might well have missed, and which Democrats in particular should be interested in.

Here's how far you can trust the loyalty of Bob Barr. While serving as a member of the Libertarian National Committee over the past two years, Barr has also headed a PAC that was simultaneously delivering thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Republican candidates around the country--even in races where the Libertarian Party was running candidates.

That, for my liberal friends, is not the key part (because, after all, which should jason, geek, cassandra, pandora, or dv care about the internal treacheries of opposing parties, major or minor?).

Here's my point. Among these contributions, the Barr PAC sent the following to support Georgia chickenshit ('scuse me, I meant chickenhawk) Republican Saxby Chambliss:

Georgia Senate race

Libertarian candidate: Allen Buckley

Bob Barr supported
05/08/07 Saxby Chambliss for Senate $ 500
06/22/07 Saxby Chambliss for Senate $1000
09/28/07 Saxby Chambliss for Senate $1000
01/07/08 Saxby Chambliss for Senate $1000

Total to Republican candidate [Saxby Chambliss] in George Senate race: $3,500

Total to Libertarian candidate in George Senate race: $ 0

I may never agree with my friends at DL about much, but on this we can smoke the pipe together:

Anyone who would actually raise money to support Saxby Chambliss has demonstrated that he lacks the judgment to run for President on anybody's ticket.

So, if knowing Barr co-wrote the Patriot Act, opposed civil unions and gay marriage, wants a hard-line immigration policy, supports the war on drugs, and can't seem to figure out whether to stay in Iraq or leave is not enough reason to realize he is not even a valid third-party candidate, then I guess the Saxby Chambliss litmus test will have to seal the deal.

Two interesting ironies to close out this post:

1) If you visit Allen Buckley's web site, you will actually find this reference: "See: Bob Barr's take on surveillance laws, with which I fully agree." Somebody really ought to tell the poor bastard that Barr is pumping cash into his opponent's campaign. (Moreover, if you take the time to read Buckley's take on the issues, you'll find that--aside from immigration, where he's indistinguishably different from Saxby's neolithic position--his positions are actually spelled out in detail and fairly rational. I don't agree with all of them, but I could sure go a lot further with him than with Chambliss.)

2) If you visit Saxby Chambliss's web site and click your way through the Issues, you'll be challenged to discover a single issue upon which good ole Saxhole presents an even vaguely Libertarian point of view.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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