Will those who believe in Barr’s sincerity state their reasons?

For me Barr’s insincerity is the second most important reason that he is an unsuitable standard bearer for the Libertarian Party. The most important is his repulsive, backward social conservatism. I think the LP should wear a face that is attractive and forward-looking.

The choice of Barr reflects badly on the Libertarian Party, and thus on the libertarian movement.

To be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler. “Truly Hitlerian,” the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer pronounced Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, opined that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers “misread our system as one that’s weak, that can’t take casualties. ... Hitler made that mistake.” Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, said of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last spring, “Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system.” In the same month, the defense analyst Richard Perle mused on whether it had been “a correct reading” of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat “to believe that business could be done with him that would produce a result? I don’t think so. These are the difficult decisions. Diplomacy with Hitler. Chamberlain went to Munich, presumably on the theory that you talk to your enemies and not to your friends, and what did it produce?”
Just about the only place the neoconservative movement can’t locate Hitler is Nazi Germany. In 1943, the founding-neocon-to-be, Irving Kristol, publicly dismissed the “near hysterical insistence upon the pressing military danger,” Jacob Heilbrunn reports in his new book, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.” While the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers, Kristol, then a 23-year-old Trotskyist, held fast to his conviction that the Allies were no different from the Axis in their imperialism. Kristol took this view because he was “indulging in an abstract crusade for a better world.”
Sound familiar? In March 2003, Kristol’s son, William, the editor of The Weekly Standard (and now a New York Times Op-Ed columnist), cheered on the United States invasion of Iraq while bin Laden remained at large. Hussein, Kristol wrote with Lawrence F. Kaplan, was “a threat to civilization” and defeating him would kick off a glorious campaign to spread freedom and democracy across the globe. Although William’s argument was precisely opposite to Irving’s 59 years earlier, it sprang from the same crusading myopia.
Neoconservatives don’t think small. They also tend to spurn empirical methods of inquiry, giving the lie to Kristol père’s famous aphorism that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. It’s truer to say that a neoconservative is a liberal (or, more often these days, just a plain old conservative) who has been seduced by the notion that America is in steep decline and must reassert itself as a moral and military force in an otherwise corrupt world. Neocons bear, Heilbrunn writes, “an uncompromising temperament” and a prophetic cast of mind, and they “use (and treat) ideas as weapons in a moral struggle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/books/review/Noah-t.html?ex=1359781200&en=8303569e618a634a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Also See

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_28/review1.html

Obviously I am closer to Paul than Barr, but Barr is getting there and “sufficiently Paul-like”. At the FFF conference Paul delivered a very good speech and mentioned some good things about CIA operatives, of which he has been very critical. With his positive comments he most probably has Michael Scheuer end Bob Barr in mind.

Are you going to attend the TX LP meeting tomorrow? Then you can meet Barr and rant and ask him and get a first hand impression of him.

“Stop the War Threats, Emphasize Diplomacy with Iran, Says Bob Barr”

Maybe Barf should stop the hypocrisy and emphasize the fact that he is a con artist (politician). This is the same statist that voted FOR illegal wars of aggression. Of course, he has suddenly changed his tune to pander to the gullible barfers.

Perhaps “a former Congressman”?

Reading between the lines, there’s a difference between noninterventionism and anti-pre-emption. It’s also a complex world, and many many interlocking treaties and so forth.

Even while at war with our enemies, declared or not, we have been talking to them. Until this administration, that is.

You cannot have accomodation or appeasement, or compromise, or peace, without that diplomatic discussion, even and ESPECIALLY after the bullets start flying.

The error in reasoning is the same one that the Donderos of the world make: that any compromise or negotiation is giving in, giving up, and appeasement in the Chamberlain sense. That is just not true, and history bears it out. Korea 1953 ended the fighting on a compromise that is still in effect today with the DMZ. Desert Storm ended its fighting with a compormise that we let Saddam be and he wouldn’t go after Kuwait again (we screwed that up with our post-WWI-like demands on top of that, but that’s another story.). Grant compromised with Lee at Appotamattox, which allowed the Confederates to simply stop fighting and go home, when Grant could have defeated them to the last man in another week or so. We compromised with Japan to end WWII, probably saving millions of lives in the process (which would have been the death count if we had to invade their home islands, A-bombs or not).

Negotiating from a position of strength is not appeasement or surrender! It is, however, a sign of diplomatic maturity and honor to say, “Enough, let’s end this.” If we sat down at the table with Iran and talked with them, we are still in the position of strength, and it would be the right thing to do. It could even prevent a war that nobody outside 1600PA wants. Iran doesn’t want a war with us, and the American people don’t want war with them. Only the Bush cabal does, under the bogus nuclear weapons excuse and only then over the Caspian oil field of some 400B barrels and a pipeline route.

This proper exercise in doplomacy is what should have been done in the first place, and it has been ignored, because Bush is stuck in kindergarten-playground diplomacy mode, and we live in a grown-up international world. In other words, the actions are the wrong ones, and the rest of the world sees it and knows it.

Barr, to his credit here, sees and acknowledges that. My only dispute was with his preemptive comment, which was dealt with above.

“Freedom has never been so fragile so close to slipping from our grasp as it is this moment. Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a Utopian solution of peace without victory, they call their policy “accommodation”. And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as war mongers. By committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now you can give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters. Alexander Hamiltion said a nation which can prefer disgrace to danger, is prepared for a master, and deserves one.

Now lets set the record straight…
There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war. But there’s only one guarantee you can have peace and you can have it in the next second…surrender.

Admittedly there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement. And this is the specter our well meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement. And it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender, If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum… and what then?

He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the war, and some day when it comes time to deliver the final ultimatum our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have been weakened from within morally, spiritually and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for peace at any price, or as one commentator put it, “he’d rather live on his knees than die on his feet”. And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.

If nothing in life is worth dying for, then when did this begin? Just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses should have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the Pharoes? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the “shot heard round the world”? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazi’s didn’t die in vain.

Where then is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies there is a price we will not pay there is a point beyond which they must not advance. And in destroying, they would destroy that which represents the ideas that you and I hold dear. This is the meaning, in the phrase of Barry Goldwater, “peace through strength”. Winston Churchill said the destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits not animals, and he said there’s something going on in time and space and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this the last, best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”