At their convention on Sunday, Libertarians nominated former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr as their presidential nominee for 2008. Today, Rep. Ron Paul may be the most famous former Libertarian Party candidate, but Barr — who rose to national notoriety as one of the loudest-mouths of the Clinton impeachment prosecutors in the House — is hands down the best known candidate ever nominated by the party.
“As a Republican candidate for the House in 1994, he rose to national attention when reports alleged that he had licked whipped cream off the breasts of two women at a charity event.”
– Milbank
And this appears to be the point. Buoyed by the relative success of the Ron Paul campaign, the LP has nominated Barr to draw attention to its cause: minimal government and personal liberty. From Barr’s candidacy, they may well get the publicity they seek, but at what cost?

Barr’s record before his conversion in the Bush era is anything but libertarian. In particular, he has been a relentless advocate of using the government to enforce a fundamentalist rightwing morals agenda, even though his own personal behavior has been anything but upright. as WaPo’s Dana Milbank pointed out earlier this month:

As a Republican candidate for the House in 1994, he rose to national attention when reports alleged that he had licked whipped cream off the breasts of two women at a charity event.

As a congressman from Georgia, the thrice-married Barr returned attention to the whipped-cream episode when, speaking in support of the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA], he argued that “the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundations of our society.”

As one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Barr gained enough prominence to attempt a run for the Senate in 2002. But that effort fell apart at about the time Barr accidentally fired a .38-caliber pistol through a glass door at a fundraising reception.

As an elder statesmen, Barr returned to the public eye when, appearing in the film “Borat,” he made a pinched expression after being told that the cheese he had just sampled came from a woman’s breast milk.

Milbank soft-pedals Barr’s involvement in DOMA. He didn’t just speak out in favor of it, he was one of the authors of the egregious law that Republicans successfully floated as an effort to create a wedge between Pres. Clinton and his legions of gay supporters in the 1996 presidential campaign.

The passage of DOMA was one of the sorriest episodes of the Clinton years. It was marshaled through the House by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich — who was engaged in an extra-marital affair at the time, and championed in the Senate by then-Majority Leader Bob Dole, who left his first wife for a stewardess — and finally signed into law by Pres. Clinton, who was also concurrently boinking “that woman,” Monica Lewinsky.

In general, no one outside the gay community was bothered over-much by all his mendacity and sexual hypocrisy. But what should raise everyone’s hackles is the fact that Barr says he is running for president, in part, to right the wrongs of the Bush administration.

In 1997, two years before the actual impeachment of Pres. Clinton, Barr introduced HR304, a resolution calling for an Inquiry of Impeachment — a move prompted, he said, after an appearance on Oct. 15, 1997, before the House Judiciary Committee by Attorney General Janet Reno, when “[it] became patently obvious that the Department of Justice was not going to move on any of these allegations [against the Clinton administration] in any serious way.”

For this early effort, Barr was given a leading spot in the real impeachment in 1998, which led to the weakening of the Democratic Party — which was the true purpose of the impeachment — which, in turn, paved the way for the election of George Bush, whose attorneys general have persistently turned a blind eye toward Bush’s malfeasance and that the widespread criminality within his administration.

Liberals can only hope that Ron Paul’s supporters and others will vote for Barr in November in sufficient numbers to take the election away from John McCain in a close race, the way Ralph Nader handed the election to Bush in Florida in the 2000 campaign.