by Bob Barr | Feb 7, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerFirst things first. The Biden administration is weak, ineffective, and indecisive in its handling of America’s foreign and national security affairs. Based on its record so far, it would be easy, and likely accurate, to conclude that in handling the Great China Spy Balloon Caper of 2023, Team Biden showed itself to be weak, ineffective, and indecisive. Simply criticizing the administration for failing to shoot down the Chinese balloon earlier during the course of the wind-borne vehicle’s leisurely trek across America, however, misses important policy aspects of this episode.First, we do not know everything about the capabilities, intent, and purpose(s) behind either the Chinese operators of the clumsy balloon and its clunky cargo, or of precisely what our country’s capabilities were or are in defending against and neutralizing whatever threat it posed. Figuring out why China’s communist leaders do what they do, is no easier than deciphering decision-making inside the Kremlin, which, as Winston Churchill said, is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Did Beijing send this almost amateurish balloon device cruising over our sovereign territory simply to see what we would do? Was it actually equipped with listening devices of sufficient capability to pick up communications that are not collectable by other means, notably, satellites? Was China’s President Xi Jinping hoping that the Americans would take action to neutralize its capabilities in order to gauge our jamming abilities? Was it a ploy to accomplish a diplomatic goal, having no real intelligence purpose at the outset?What actually did our defense and intelligence agencies know about the balloon, and what in fact did we do about it? If our government is...
by Bob Barr | Feb 2, 2023 | Townhall Article |
TownhallIn 1971, left wing provocateur Saul Alinsky published Rules For Radicals, which remains even today, a half century later, a favored handbook for extremists intent on undermining our nation’s economic, civic, and legal foundation and rebuilding it in the image of a socialist society. For the radical disruptor in Alinsky’s worldview, “everything is relative and changing”; in other words, to succeed as a revolutionary, existing values and norms must attacked and unanchored. Only by so doing can the new, radical ideas take hold and replace existing principles. This is precisely what the “woke” movement is doing, most disturbingly to our legal system.At the most fundamental level, the “anchor” for our legal system is the Bill of Rights, which provides a set of substantive and procedural guarantees designed to ensure that fairness and objectivity attach to all aspects of the civil and criminal justice processes. These well-known standards include among many others, the right to counsel, the right to be tried fairly by a jury of one’s peers, and the right to be considered innocent unless and until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt. These are not “relative and changing” standards, and if they were thus unmoored, legal chaos would prevail. Yet this is precisely what the “woke” movement is attempting to do to our judicial system and the legal profession.How about the right to have a lawyer to represent you? The idea that even hated defendants have a right to be represented by competent legal counsel to ensure their rights are protected, predates the incorporation of that principle in the Bill of Rights. John Adams, one of our Founders and our second president, declared it was an...
by Bob Barr | Jan 31, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIt sounded like a good idea. A new, reform-minded police chief in a crime-ridden city, coupled with a specialized, neighborhood-focused police unit to target crime “hot spots.” It even had a cool acronym – the “SCORPION” unit, short for “Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods.”As with many similar specialized law enforcement units formed over the years in major metropolitan areas, however, the seeds of failure, if not disaster, were present as soon as the Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn Davis launched the SCORPION unit in late 2021. For starters, the mission for the 40 officers manning the special unit was ill-defined – basically to go into self-identified “hot spots” and make arrests. The strategy presumably would bring “peace,” even if it meant stopping individuals for minor offenses, such as suspected “reckless driving.” In fact, the initial predicate for the Jan. 7 SCORPION stop of the now-deceased Tyre Nichols was precisely that. In stopping Nichols, the officers appeared to be following a directive from Chief Davis herself when she set out her crime-fighting strategy shortly after assuming the department’s reins in 2021. At the time, she reportedly emphasized explicitly that “reckless driving” was to be a police department priority. By green lighting the practice of initiating police stops in “hot spot” areas for nothing more than “suspected reckless driving,” she set in motion a series of events that easily could, and did, spiral out of control.The now-disbanded SCORPION unit appears also to have suffered from a defect common to many specialized police units over the years – insufficient and poorly trained supervision. In fact, it appears the unit that stopped...
by Bob Barr | Jan 26, 2023 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
TownhallDuring the 2020 election cycle, uber wealthy Mark Zuckerberg orchestrated much of Big Tech’s plan to ensure that more Democrat votes were cast and counted in key precincts across the country.In this, Big Tech was aided in large measure by three factors: the cover of COVID as an excuse to “facilitate” the voting process, lax election laws in many states, and the lure of “free” money for local officials (including Republican office holders) always eager to receive more of it.Three years later, some things have changed that will force these players to alter their tactics in manipulating election procedures, but Big Tech’s will to do so has not in the least diminished.Changes to voting procedures implemented in recent years, most notably widespread mail-in and multi-day voting, have become systematized to the degree that voters (and many courts) now consider it a right to be able to cast votes days if not weeks in advance of scheduled and lawful voting days. It has become the status quo.Granted, it has not always worked out the way Democrats hoped and planned; just ask Georgia Democrat super star Stacey Abrams, who lost decisively to incumbent GOP Governor Brian Kemp last November.On the other hand, Democrats have achieved several notable successes thanks to massive early and mail-in balloting. By all accounts, for example, Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate, and now sitting Sen. John Fetterman, benefitted greatly from having a huge number of votes cast for him in the days and weeks before his sole debate with his GOP opponent, during which he performed miserably.Much media attention was drawn to the Left’s brazen and prideful effort...
by Bob Barr | Jan 24, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIn addition to writing one of the seminal novels of the 20th Century in 1984, British writer George Orwell was an accomplished linguist. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, he sized up the language of politics as the practice of designing something “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Lewis Carroll put it perhaps less eloquently, but no less accurately, in Through the Looking Glass – “When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” A perfect example of Orwell’s and Carroll’s pithy observations was displayed last weekend when a freelance write named David Peisner, described the torching of a police cruiser and smashing of bank and storefronts in Atlanta by a group of eco-terrorists angry about the construction of a public safety training center in a wooded area just outside the city, as something — anything — other than “violence.” His sophomoric rambling was defended by a pedigreed CNN national security analyst with gobbledygook of her own.Though not alone among media outlets in its pursuit of linguistic fluidity, CNN in particular has made a practice in recent years of describing scenes of destructive rioting as “mostly peaceful,” and in fact not even meeting the network’s threshold of being “violent” in the first place; as in its 2020 coverage of widespread disturbances in Kenosha, Wisconsin following a police shooting.CNN’s practice of torturously twisting language in order to avoid calling violence “violence” may be premised on the fact that the network disagrees with the underlying acts or the...
