The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

..but we’re terribly sorry that we haven’t had much on this blog about Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr.

Here’s one of his TV ads:

There’s also this New Yorker article on Barr from last week’s issue, with this interesting tidbit about his life that I did not know:

“Barr’s father, a graduate of West Point, was an engineer who specialized in foreign civil-infrastructure projects, and Barr—who was born in Iowa City, and has five brothers and sisters—spent most of his childhood overseas. He was entering the third grade when his family moved to Baghdad and rented a house near the Tigris. Barr often played along the river, until a brigadier general named Abdul Karim Qasim seized power, in 1958, throwing the country into turmoil. “There was a twenty-four-hour curfew,” Barr told me. “You could not leave the house. The only communication we had was among friends and colleagues, and short-wave radio. It was a fairly bloody revolution. I didn’t see it, but I certainly knew what was going on.”

The family’s experience in Iraq established a pattern. As an expatriate, Barr enjoyed unusual personal freedom, but often against a backdrop of tyranny or political upheaval. He was detached from American society as well as from the culture around him. In Panama, where his father briefly took a job, the family one night attempted to have dinner in the American-controlled Canal Zone, but were turned away because their car had a Panama license plate. (“Even though we were U.S. citizens, and this was considered U.S. territory, we were second-class citizens,” Barr told me.) Before Panama, Barr’s family lived in Peru, where, as a teen-ager, he learned Spanish. He went to parties, drank, and smoked. A friend of his recalled, “Really, there were no rules, and we didn’t like rules, and the few rules that there were we really didn’t follow.” On expeditions into the Amazon, Barr fished for piranhas, and hunted alligators at night. “You would take a .22 rifle and creep along the riverbank with a flashlight,” he told me. “The light would catch their eyes, and you would see these two glowing points of red, and you would shoot for that.” Barr learned to adapt. “You make friends quickly,” he told me. “But you don’t become too attached, because you know you’re not going to be with them for that long.” His hobby was astronomy—the single geographic constant in his life at the time was the sky.”

Read the full article here.

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