by Bob Barr | May 12, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall To point out the elephant sitting next to the 500-pound gorilla in the room, the federal government spends too much money. In spite of the regular verbal abuses levelled at so-called “earmarks,” they are not to blame for this massive problem. In a sense, earmarks, can be considered part of the solution. Why? Because they are transparent. One of the primary catalysts for profligate spending is the near-complete lack of transparency in the annual congressional appropriations process. Rather than budgets with neatly organized line-items detailing where and how taxpayer dollars are spent, most federal spending results from huge pots of money allocated by very general categories for the thousands of federal offices, agencies, and departments authorized to spend those dollars. Attempting to track specifically where monies eventually are spent is nearly impossible, even for those familiar with the arcane process. This purposeful lack of transparency is made worse due to decades of funding government through short-term (usually “emergency”) bills, where bloat and the sheer speed at which the bills are passed helps to ensure opacity. One of the most popular Beltway novelties is Sen. Rand Paul’s annual “Festivus Report” that confirms what we have long known, which is that government is wasteful. The truly bothersome take-away from Rand’s study is the degree to which it makes clear the absurd ways in which taxpayer dollars actually are being wasted. While Rand’s yearly opus sheds a broad light on wasteful spending, it is by definition, after-the-fact. Earmarks, on the other hand, provide a more current way for taxpayers to see how some of those federal dollars are to be spent, as they...
by Bob Barr | May 5, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall The Central Intelligence Agency under President Joe Biden and his appointed director, Bill Burns, appears to have morphed into yet another tool of the “woke” Left; unrecognizable to many of the men and women who, like me, were proud to serve what was in years past the world’s preeminent intelligence agency. It has become an embarrassment. In a recent recruitment video published on social media, the point is made clear that the mission for employees of today’s CIA is not about serving as members of a team committed to providing the very best objective intelligence to policymakers in the administration. The mission now is more about using the CIA as a vehicle to boost one’s self-image. This ad, perhaps dreamed up by some overly woke ad agency, has the self-declared 36-year-old female CIA employee refusing “to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas about what a woman can or should be.” She then informs us that she is “tired of feeling like I have to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance.” Labeling this gobbledygook idiotic is being overly kind. In fact, when I first saw this video, I thought it was a joke. Sadly, it is not. It is an official CIA recruitment video, obviously directed to self-centered individuals with pre-existing psychological issues (including something the star of the video calls “generalized anxiety disorder”). At National Review, Charles Cooke humorously pans the video as a “well-targeted” recruitment tool, given the sorts of people who respond positively to it are “already experts in manipulating, infiltrating, surveilling, and extracting dubious confessions from the rest of us.” However, the video...
by Bob Barr | Apr 28, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall President Biden is returning to the Barack Obama playbook of “reforming” municipal police departments by forcing multi-year federal court “consent decrees” down their throats — a strategy that makes it extremely difficult for those departments to hire and retain good officers, or to administer their agencies in accord with the needs of the communities they serve. Of course, as with everything being undertaken by this Administration, it is all about race and politics, not good policing. Police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville are but the latest recipients of this federal intervention. It is noteworthy, though not often noted, that both of these cities have been under Democrat Party control for more than three-quarters of a century. One reason why left-wing propagandists, such as Black Lives Matter and the mainstream media fail to note this anomaly, is that it invites the uncomfortable question of how, with Democrats at the helm of these cities for so long, police departments under their purview descended into the alleged hotbed of systemic racism that now warrants federal oversight by the notoriously heavy-handed Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. A key question that should be asked, but of course is not, is what precisely is to be accomplished by Democrat bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. that has not been possible for Democrats locally across nearly eight decades of control. Investigating and prosecuting real cases of alleged civil rights violations by police officers is a legitimate focus for the Department of Justice, especially in cases for which there is no adequate prosecution by state authorities. Were this the sole focus by the Civil Rights Division, it...
by Bob Barr | Apr 21, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall For the eight years I represented Georgia’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House, I was a member of the Financial Services Committee; a committee on which California Rep. Maxine Waters also served. It did not take long for me to learn that she is as mean-spirited as they come, a characteristic she wears proudly to this day. Over the course of the past year, however, as violence, looting, and attacks on law enforcement officers spread across our country, Waters’ mean streak has become far more than a reason to avoid crossing her path in person. Her calls for demonstrators in Minneapolis and elsewhere to become ever “more confrontational” reveal Maxine Waters to be more than a deeply unpleasant individual, but rather a public menace, inciting mobs to violence as a new mini warlord for the Left. While Waters might prefer for people to think that her bluster is the result of heat-of-the-moment passion, the reality is that it is all carefully planned political grandstanding, something she has perfected over decades of haranguing. Three decades ago, for example, as a freshman member of the House, Waters cheered on as mobs rampaged through south Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King verdict. More than five dozen people died in those riots. True to form, in 2020 as mobs ransacked businesses, police headquarters, and other government buildings in cities from Portland, Oregon to New York and Washington, DC, Waters has been in the forefront of urging continued confrontation against law enforcement and all manner of other targets of demonstrators’ ire. Last year’s rioting added up to $2...
by Bob Barr | Apr 14, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall When I use a word, ‘Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. As villains in 20th Century literature go, Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead, would hardly seem frightful. He was not a serial killer, terrorist, or supernatural stalker, but rather a diminutive newspaper critic who brought society to the brink of ruin through nothing more than corrupting the meaning of words. It seems clear that Democrats have a similar plan in mind. It is for this reason that conservatives should not dismiss out of hand Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s inane tweet last week that paid leave, childcare, and caregiving constituted “infrastructure” projects. In Gillibrand’s and President Biden’s world, as they collect votes for their $2.25 trillion infrastructure spending package, anything can become “infrastructure,” making it easier to sell to their colleagues and to voters. Similar linguistic chicanery is displayed whenever the Administration sidesteps responsibility for the current chaos at our southern border. Rather than a quickly spiraling health and national security crisis, the border situation is simply a “challenge” — a nuisance if you will, to be noted for the record. By the same legerdemain, and at times even in the same news cycle, “climate change” becomes “climate emergency,” “silence is violence,” and “education” devolves into plopping kids in front of a laptop for six hours a day. When words no longer have definite, objective meaning, they no longer anchor policies or actions to objective, universal principles. The result is public policies that are infinitely malleable, where nothing is certain, and where rebutting such arguments is...
by Bob Barr | Apr 7, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall What makes a mass shooter capable of emotionless, indiscriminate killing remains largely a mystery. Such a depraved act is not within the normal programming of a human being, not even for most hardened criminals. We may never truly understand all the factors, both physiological and environmental, that turn angry people into mass killers, but there is much we do know and can figure out, if common sense is our guide. Since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, the mass shooting phenomenon has been intensively studied by experts in a number of disciplines, from law enforcement to sociology and psychiatry. The research has revealed patterns and understandings that have led to life-saving techniques for responding to mass shootings, such as law enforcement confronting the shooters quickly rather than waiting for a tactical approach, and implementing threat assessment protocols to identify at-risk individuals and get them needed help before reaching a tipping point. Noticeably absent from this school of research is any evidence of a pattern regarding the firearms used to commit these killings – a point hopelessly lost on Democrats. Rather than attempt to tackle the far more complex cultural and social issues at the root of mass shootings, the answer for Democrats is always more gun control; even when such crimes occur, as often they do, in jurisdictions that already have in place extremely restrictive gun control measures. Democrats’ persistence on gun control as a response to mass killings is not just perplexing, but counterproductive and downright stupid. With all we do know about mass shootings, there simply is no excuse for Democrats to play dumb when it comes to the...
