Remora
LI's brothers live in Gwinnett County, Georgia. For their affection and votes, two men were running for the House of Representatives in the Republican Primary this year: Bob Barr and John Linder.
LI knew who the right choice was there, all right. It was Barr, all the way.
Barr, though, was defeated, and polite liberalism everywhere seems to find this only proper. Here's the WP editorial about it:

"There was no nastiness or acid-dripping one-liner that was too much for Bob Barr. He proudly broadcast a commercial depicting himself as a bulldog. Voters in the 7th District, though conservative, had no use for a spotlight-craving politician who lives for the insult."

Living for the insult isn't such a bad thing to do if you are good at insulting. Bob Barr was to conservativism what Gorgeous George was to wrestling -- a man who made a minor art form out of a fixed and venal venue. To call Linder, his opponent, non-descript is to exaggerate. Apparently at one point, Linder, in a debate with Barr, alluded to his 39 year marriage. Well, that is about the sum of the man's accomplishments -- he is able to perform monogamy.

Barr and Linder shared rightwing records, but the good thing about Barr was that he was, eccentrically enough, a civil libertarian. He sponsored a bill with Barney Frank to abolish drug forfeiture law, and it even passed. It was later vetoed by Clinton, ever afraid of not appearing tough on crime, even if that means countenancing the transformation of police departments into banditti. And banditti, moreover, who prey on blacks -- racial profiling being, in one of its aspects, the expropriating of 'inappropriate' sums of money from black men on our nations highways, from New Jersey to Louisiana. Barr was, like Linder, a good second amendment man -- and LI does have a weakness for that second amendment. But the love affair with the pistol does seem to have awakened him to some of the more onerous encroachments of the government on our civil liberties. There was a story in the American Prospect, last year, about the alliance between Barr and the ACLU to modify the more barbarous strippings of our freedom proposed, in the name of the Heimat, by the Bush coup team:

"The day after the attack, Halperin [with the ACLU] began e-mailing his colleagues. By the time they called their first press conference on September 20, they had a name (Organizations in Defense of Freedom), a 10-point statement of principles, and even spin-offs (such as Computer Scientists in Defense of Freedom). They also had a secret weapon: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, scourge of the liberals, conservative guru par excellence. "The Bush administration said, 'We've got a bill that we've gotta pass right away,'" recalls Norquist. "As soon as I heard that, I began to get worried."...

"Almost immediately, prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill began to sound a lot like Ted Kennedy. "Why is it necessary to propose a laundry list of changes to criminal law generally and criminal procedure generally and cast such a wide net?" Republican Congressman Bob Barr demanded in the House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on Attorney General John Ashcroft's antiterrorism proposals. "And why is it necessary to rush this through?"

It strikes LI as nutty that some liberals think electing Linder is a victory. It isn't. It seems like a victory only if you confuse partisan wrangling -- for instance, Barr's prominence as a Clinton impeacher -- with real political goals. If you do, you will always have a home with the DNC.