Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr talked with the Washington Post about his campaign and what’s wrong with the Republican Party:
Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, offered a scathing critique of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today and predicted he would garner substantial conservative Republican support in a handful of battleground states critical to McCain in his campaign against Democratic Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).
Barr, a one-time conservative Republican House member from Georgia who broke with the Bush administration and many of his former congressional colleagues, blasted McCain for his support of the war in Iraq, his energy policies and his stand on reducing government spending.
“With regard to domestic policy, Sen. McCain really has put forward nothing that would indicate he believes in dramatically shrinking the size and cost of the government,” Barr said during an interview on washingtonpost.com’s “PostTalk” program. “He does talk a great game about doing away with earmarks, but that really does not get near to the heart of the matter of the massive federal spending, the massive federal debt and the deficits we’re running.”
(…)
Barr, 59, for years was a conservative Republican foot soldier in the House who strongly supported the war in Iraq, was a booster of the Patriot Act that strengthened the government’s domestic surveillance powers, backed measures to ban gay marriage and voted to block the use of marijuana for medical purposes.
But since renouncing the GOP and embracing the anti-government tenets of the Libertarian party a couple years ago, Barr has flip-flopped repeatedly and now strongly opposes the war, condemns the Patriot Act as a violation of civil liberties, criticizes efforts to restrict gay rights, and even favors the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes.
Barr said that “the tremendous growth” of federal government powers since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “has so dramatically shrunk the sphere of personal liberty in this country … that it has really caused myself and many other Americans … to take a much harder look at government power than we did in the past.”
It is, I think, a little crass to call the fact that Barr has, for legitimate reasons that existed before he ever talked about running for Preisdent, “flip-flopped” on this issues.
Did he change his position ?
Yea, but so what ? I’d rather have a politician who admits that they were wrong than one who continues to blindly follow the same failed ideas.
Here’s the video:
