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GOP shouldn’t take cues from a libertarian presidential dud
By Ed Lindsey, August 23, 2013
Like Alice tumbling through the rabbit hole into a realm of the contrary and grotesque, there are those curious moments in politics when absurdity has the edge. Moments like those last week, when a repeated political defector demanded Republican faithful excise a popular governor because he offended his own renegade sensibilities.
Bob Barr, the failed 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate-cum-Mad Hatter, said Republicans must strip from their ranks New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and brand the pol as a “disingenuous” political gamer.
“There should be no room in the GOP for Christie’s nebulous, if not disingenuous, political games,” Barr writes at Townhall, “and, it is time conservatives show him the door before his carefully self-nurtured image as the GOP ‘tough guy’ … destroys any remaining semblance of the conservative GOP base first constructed by Reagan two generations ago.”
The irony is almost too great.
This is the same Bob Barr who bolted from the GOP, abandoning many of the policies he once held, and campaigned for president as a Libertarian in 2008 to peel away GOP votes, knowing such a move would help Barack Obama win the White House. The same Bob Barr who now, believing his old party was again politically ascendant, wants Republicans to return him to Congress.
In 2002, Barr deserted his then-district in Cobb County, Ga. to primary a fellow GOP congressman, Fair Tax crusader John Linder, in a neighboring district he believed to be more fertile.
But after an unceremonious spanking at the ballot box at the hands of Rep. Linder, Barr abandoned his party and quickly landed on the payroll of the ACLU, marijuana legalization campaigns, and the notoriously ruthless and corrupt former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.
In the years that followed he abdicated his earlier positions on gay marriage and illicit drugs, even opposing Georgia’s attempt to stem the tide of illegal immigration within our state’s sovereign border.
Republican-turned-libertarian-turned-Republican Bob Barr may think Ronald Reagan would disapprove of Christie, whom he believes is a “liberal masquerading as a conservative,” but it was the former president who famously lectured unfit political gatekeepers that his “eighty percent friend is not my twenty percent enemy.”
Like the Gipper, I do not have to agree with Gov. Christie on every issue to respect his efforts to rein in public labor unions, reduce government waste, and protect our national security.
If Gov. Christie decides to pursue a presidential bid in 2016, he will be a valued addition to a stellar crop of conservative would-be candidates. Candidates, like Sens. Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum and Govs. Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker and Rick Perry, who never abandoned their party and principles for personal self-aggrandizement at a perilous time for our country.
Republicans are savvy enough to spot a phony, and certainly savvy enough to do so without a phony like Bob Barr lecturing them.
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