by Bob Barr | Jun 1, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller In the interests of accurate reporting, we need to drop the pretense that the violent protests rocking major American cities have anything to do with seeking justice for the Memorial Day death of George Floyd. Any positive concern for justice that might have motivated protestors in the immediate aftermath of his death evaporated as events quickly morphed into mass violence against businesses, government structures, police officers and even historic churches. If participants truly were concerned that without protests the person responsible for Floyd’s death would somehow escape justice, they would have backed down as soon as the indictment of former police officer Derek Chauvin was announced (within days of Floyd’s death). True, Chauvin has not yet been convicted and sentenced. But the process by which his guilt is to be established according to standards of due process under both Minnesota’s and America’s constitutions, will proceed as expeditiously as possible. No legitimate system of justice can operate with greater dispatch. So, in trying to answer questions about what the mobs in Minneapolis and other cities are seeking, we can rule out the premise that they are looking for justice against Officer Chauvin; unless, of course, they are seeking vigilante justice or the “sentence-first” brand of justice depicted in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. If members of the rampaging mobs were themselves victims of individual or group injustice of the sort that befell Floyd or many black men before him, there might be some sense of legitimacy attached to their actions (at least up to the point their actions turned violent). It becomes impossible to view these protestors with any degree of...
by Bob Barr | May 27, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Townhall.com It has become commonplace for the Left to go into fits of conniption over things said by President Trump or in response to actions he takes. The latest Democrat outrage against the administration, responding to the president’s moves to weaken the federal Nanny State, however, is worth noting. What makes this most recent administration initiative especially delightful, is that Trump is turning one of the Democrats’ favorite aphorisms back against them: “You should never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Whether Clinton insider Rahm Emanuel coined the phrase or was simply quoting Winston Churchill, who is alleged to have said this decades earlier, modern leftists have taken the maxim to heart. Virtually every major crisis our country has confronted in recent years has prompted moves for greater and more costly government involvement in the economy. This has been the case whether the emergencies we face are man-made, such as the 2008 recession, or birthed by Mother Nature as was the case with 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, spawned by the novel coronavirus, clearly is no exception. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s cadre of liberal and ultra-liberal federal legislators, and their mainstream media mouthpieces, have not for a moment let up in their calls for federal spending and regulatory mandates as the essential tools with which to defend against the virus. In fact, they have become increasingly extreme. The left-wing Guardian recently was moved to declare that the pandemic presents the perfect scenario to “make a greener world.” It is no exaggeration to conclude that for many on the left, including the prominent New York socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the...
by Bob Barr | May 26, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller Blue state governors and blue city mayors are continuing to repeat their “sky-is-falling” outcries that people should be afraid to take a walk in the park without wearing a mask. Bureaucrats are continuing to issue repetitive dire warnings that the country, if not the world, is on the brink of Coronavirus Armageddon. Thank goodness the scientists at NASA and the entrepreneurs working at Elon Musk’s SpaceX are not basing their actions on such doomsayers as New York City’s Bill de Blasio or California’s Gavin Newsom. We all should be thankful that neither Musk nor NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine are following the inconsistent edicts of Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the exaggerated wailing of Rick Bright, the disgruntled HHS fearmonger who recently was demoted by President Trump. Weather permitting, just after 4:30 PM EDT on Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon9 heavy rocket booster will lift off from the same launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center from which the Apollo 11 crew began their awe-inspiring journey to the moon. This week, nearly 51 years later, astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be strapped into a “Crew Dragon” spacecraft chock-full of technology that makes the interior of the Apollo 11 Lunar Command Module, which was state-of-the-art in its time, pale in comparison. They will rendezvous the next day with the International Space Station (ISS). Wednesday’s launch carries great significance; aside from the fact it is being undertaken while many government agencies and businesses remain afraid to do much of anything. The launch will be the first time in nearly a decade that American astronauts have been carried into Earth’s orbit aboard...
by Bob Barr | May 18, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller Before the decision was made in the summer of 1945 to use the atomic bomb to end the war in the Pacific, the U.S. government planned for a massive invasion of the Japanese islands. Estimates at the time said that up to half a million American lives could be lost. Still, it was a risk our leaders were willing to take in order to decisively end the bloodiest war in recorded history. In 1945, America’s military and civilian leaders were poised to take that gamble not because they were in any respect foolhardy. Rather, they understood that in war, winning comes not to the timid but to those willing to assess and weigh the cost of defeat against the value of victory and act boldly. Today, 75 years later, it seems as if few in our government would be willing to engage in that calculus and act accordingly. “Risk” — when did the term come to be considered a four-letter word; something to be avoided at all costs? During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, governments at all levels are mandating measures that are supposed to minimize the risk of individuals becoming infected with the coronavirus, even though the overall risk of most people catching the virus and dying from it is extremely low. While certain measures to guard against becoming infected with the virus make sense especially among the elderly and already-infirm population, many border on the absurd. Just days ago, for example, officials at the Veterans Administration decreed that this Memorial Day, Boy Scouts would not be permitted to place flags on graves of fallen veterans at...
by Bob Barr | May 13, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Townhall.com As President Trump himself tweets (again) in support of 26-year-old firebrand Laura Loomer’s solid congressional campaign to unseat the liberal Democrat incumbent in his home district in Florida (FL-21), the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is acting as if the race does not exist. Sadly, it is not unusual for the establishment GOP to look the other way when a movement conservative enters the arena, no matter how strong and promising that candidate may be. In fact, this race is definitely winnable. Loomer has assembled a campaign team led by veteran operatives with numerous victories under its belt, and she already has proven herself a fundraising juggernaut. While Loomer may have some rough edges, she is no dummy, and her political backbone is as solid as they come. Loomer made a name for herself as an investigative journalist, building a massive national following of 265,000 supporters on Twitter who rabidly retweeted her work and cheered in support of all that she did. (Twitter then pulled her account and banned her for life, but that is another issue for another day.) Notwithstanding support from the highest Republican office holder in the land and from numerous other key conservatives, and despite the campaign’s momentum and her “Anti-AOC profile,” the NRCC remains totally silent on Laura Loomer. The Republican Party’s top way of promoting new candidates is its “Young Guns” program. The Party’s congressional leaders pick candidates from districts across the nation who meet “the minimum threshold of campaign organization and show potential to achieve greater status.” The program currently lists 103 candidates, but the face of young, telegenic grassroots icon Loomer is...
by Bob Barr | May 12, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller In Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty told Alice that whenever he used a word, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” In today’s political discourse, the problem is not so much that people attach their own subjective meaning to words; the problem is words and phrases no longer have any meaning attached to them. Words and phrases have become untethered from objective reality. One of the latest victims of this craziness is the “presumption of innocence.” Even though the term “presumption of innocence” does not appear in our Constitution, it is among the most significant legal principles undergirding our constitutional republic. It has been one of the pillars of western civilization going back to ancient Greek and Roman cultures, and is a key element of British common law we inherited from our prior colonial bosses. While the phrases “presumption of innocence” and “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” may flow easily from the lips of most citizens, increasingly there is little or no understanding behind the words; and no patience to engage in the process needed to ensure evidence of guilt overcomes the presumption of innocence. To a large degree, this troubling situation is born of the deeply polarized political environment that has swept over our society in recent years; threatening to unravel a legal system that has long served to protect individual liberty against abuse by both government and private actors. Herd mentality that presumes an opponent guilty without concern for the evidence, or that presumes a supporter innocent regardless of the evidence, has become a hallmark of contemporary public policy debate. It was...
