by Bob Barr | Aug 25, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Underlying virtually every policy of the Left is the notion that, with enough laws, society will be ordered, and that from order will emerge safety, security, and happiness. The problem is, the well-ordered utopia long sought by leftists over the centuries, including our own, is a pipe dream that always comes at the cost of individual freedom. Still, social engineers from Washington, DC to Canberra, Australia continue their drive to force socialism upon us. The continuing COVID-19 pandemic has provided an endless supply of excuses for Big Brothers of all stripes to find new ways to control our lives – a situation that in many respects is worse than the virus itself – and the results can be bizarre. In Australia, for example, government officials are shooting rescue dogs as a way of preventing people from traveling during COVID to adopt them. Closer to home, elementary school children in districts across America are being forced to wear masks (even outdoors) that restrict their own breathing, despite the overwhelming data that the COVID risk facing these youngsters is virtually nil. The illusion of ordered safety has come to trump facts, common sense, and even basic human decency. Over the course of our nearly two-year long COVID journey, we have moved from temporary measures designed to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, to myriad legal mandates and economic restrictions wielded, rescinded, and then reimposed by public officials whenever they feel the situation warrants. It is only our Constitution — and the fact that there remain Americans who still understand and defend its guarantees of individual liberty — that has thus far...
by Bob Barr | Aug 18, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Like most Americans, the debacle surrounding the fall of Afghanistan’s capital city to the Taliban caused me great concern. In fact, we are witnessing failures of leadership decision-making and foreign intelligence analysis worse than any in modern history; certainly, worse than the failures that lead to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. To a degree, this conclusion is based on my personal experiences of having lived in that part of the world in my youth (I graduated from high school in Tehran, for example), having worked at the CIA for eight years in the 1970s, and having served in the Congress before, during, and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even without this background, however, the many negative short and long-term ramifications of this debacle cannot be overestimated. Broadly speaking, there is more than enough blame to go around leading to the dismal situation in Afghanistan that President Biden inherited on January 20th, including mistakes by all three of his immediate predecessors (one Democrat and two Republican). But the final series of decisions – or non-decisions – leading directly to this fiasco, were made by this administration, and efforts by Biden to shift blame to others is an act of cowardice. The lenses through which this administration viewed events in Afghanistan were deep rose-colored. This caused them to overlook the otherwise obvious weaknesses in both the Afghan military and its civilian government. They persisted in the narrative that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was only a “possibility,” and certainly not an “inevitability.” Even worse, they concluded that this possibility was months away, and therefore we had adequate time to arrange...
by Bob Barr | Aug 11, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall From the onset of COVID, the World Health Organization (WHO) proved itself unfit for the task of managing a global pandemic. This was not for lack of funding or of access to international experts on virology and disease; the organization had plenty of both. The WHO’s abject failure stemmed from its decision at the very start that its most important mission was to help Beijing save face over China’s role in the outbreak. With this goal in mind, the leadership intentionally downplayed any critical information about the virus that might be damaging to China’s international reputation. It is impossible for us to ever really know what China’s actions cost the international community, by both initially hiding the COVID-19 outbreak and then interfering with efforts to study the virus during its early spread. A safe guess, however, would be millions of lives and trillions of dollars. As for WHO, it simply watched China set the house on fire, then blocked fire fighters from getting to the scene. WHO’s role in helping China with this cover-up earned it a long-overdue rebuke by the Trump administration, which promised to pull U.S. funding from yet another international forum for anti-Americanism. Predictably, President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s efforts to defund WHO, but not because the organization has finally got its act together. In fact, with a recent announcement from WHO supporting a moratorium on COVID-19 vaccine boosters in the United States, the interests of WHO and those of the United States could not be more divergent. Were WHO a neutral, public health-focused agency not controlled by outside bad actors, the call for a booster moratorium could be viewed...
by Bob Barr | Aug 4, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Ratings for the Olympics are at record lows, and it is no surprise why. Between the anti-American protests of some U.S. athletes, and the empty stands that make the competition feel hollow and flat, Americans are just not catching the Olympic spirit this year. It certainly did not help when Simone Biles, America’s top Olympic gymnast, threw in the towel in the middle of her sport’s biggest competition and on the world’s biggest stage. For America, a country built on hard work, sacrifice, and a “never quit” attitude, Biles’ exit was a slap in the face to the quintessential “grit” that pioneered the very country she represented. Even more ironic, she quit not in an individual event where the fallout would impact only herself, but in the team final when her team was counting on her the most. Some say Biles did not owe “us” anything, and that she was right to do what was “best for her.” Therein lies the problem, reflective of a corrosive selfishness in athletic competition where individual “o.k.-ness” is the highest priority. Contrary to the unsurprising gushing of marshmallow soft liberals, this psychobabble kumbaya spirit does not refect “strength,” but rather textbook weakness which in decades past was afforded no place in American sports. Now, in the Age of Me, this phenomenon is being celebrated; for instance, rewarding tennis pro Naomi Osaka following her sudden withdrawal from the French Open for “mental health” reasons after ditching a press conference. Her actions netted her cover spreads in major magazines, complete with the quintessential woke headline, “IT’S O.K. NOT TO BE O.K.” This fawning coverage...
by Bob Barr | Jul 28, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall The problem with having a reputation as a political bomb-thrower is that sometimes a good idea gets lost in the dust-up. This was the case last week when, in an interview, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stated she would “kick out every single Chinese in this country that is loyal to the CCP.” Predictably, critics latched onto the word “Greene,” and immediately discounted the substance of what the freshman congresswoman proposed. In fact, if you brush aside her phraseology, there is something worthwhile and timely in what Greene is saying, and which confronts a serious national security problem most leaders in Washington, D.C. refuse to acknowledge. The dirty little secret is that our national security is being seriously undermined because far too many Chinese nationals are living and working freely here in America, even as their allegiance remains tied to the communist regime in Beijing, our primary adversary on the world stage (as I have noted previously). Federal agents rounding up large numbers of Chinese immigrants holding visas or who have resident alien status, in order to scrutinize their “loyalty” to the Chinese Communist Party, does not make for an effective (or likely constitutional) response to the threat posed by China. As a public policy, it is akin to using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is the far better tool. Moreover, were Republican leaders to adopt such a proposal, China’s leaders would sit back and smile serenely while the media, academia, and U.S. businesses with ties to the communist behemoth soundly bash the idea, thereby ensuring the proposal will fail to materialize as policy, while providing additional camouflage for...
by Bob Barr | Jul 21, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall To some degree there has been a Cold War waged against conservatives since at least the Soviet infiltration of Hollywood in the 1940s. Under President Biden, however, this war has become red hot and very real. Leftists embedded across political, non-profit, academic, and government institutions are pulling out all the stops to destroy the conservative culture and political movement in America. Never before in our history has such a concerted action been undertaken. It did not spring forth on January 20th when Biden was inaugurated. The left has been imbedding itself into institutions private and public for decades preparing for the right moment to openly launch its war. The January 6th protests on Capitol Hill provided that spark. Earlier attempts by a political party in power to use government agencies to punish political opponents were limited in their impact, largely because they were not able to co-opt major elements of those agencies to join their unlawful plans. Thus, the Nixon Administration’s use of components of the IRS, the CIA, and the FBI to go after its critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, failed to destroy its perceived enemy — the anti-war Left — because career elements within those agencies refused to join. In the end it was the perpetrators themselves who were destroyed, including the President. Now, a half century later, the situation has changed dramatically, as demonstrated in the fact that Biden’s Department of Justice and the FBI, with their vast arsenal of tools with which to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate those deemed enemies, are leading the effort to destroy the conservative movement. Moreover, the technological tools...
