During the Clinton administration, even before he became one of the managers of the impeachment case, I thought Bob Barr was a pretty scummy politician. He was out there pushing for that impeachment before Bill even met Monica, arguing that Clinton was guilty of all sorts of alleged crimes which even the anti-Clinton mob later abandoned as spurious. And then when Clinton was impeached, Barr was at the core of two outright lies that were fabricated by the "prosecution" in the Senate — the interpretation of the toy bear that Clinton gave Ms. Lewinsky and the misleading sequencing of events in the effort to find her a job. Barr struck me then as a guy who figured the road to political success was to pander to the extreme right-wing nutcases and tell them everything they wanted to hear…and then some. For years, he was especially vocal in his belief that allowing access to Medical Marijuana was tantamount to passing out heroin to schoolkids or somesuch nonsense.
Barr lost his seat in Congress in 2002. Since then, he's become a vocal Libertarian and civil rights advocate, pretty much reversing every position that the old Bob Barr held. He's now as insufferable (even if I think he's now right) in defense of Medical Marijuana as he once was in opposing it and he's done a one-eighty on most other issues, as well. The man was a main author of the Defense of Marriage Act, a piece of noxious legislation that blocked same-sex marriage. In an article in this morning's L.A. Times, he writes that he now thinks that was wrong and that the act should be overturned.
When someone you once thought was dead wrong about so many things comes over to your side, there are two possible ways to view it. One is the Ebenezer Scrooge example, where once the person sees the light, we forgive them and admire their willingness to change and admit error. You know, no one kept Christmas in their heart better than the reformed Scrooge. The other viewpoint is that they've changed positions for sheer opportunism; that you can't trust their sincerity and can't even trust them to not flip back the other way again if and when it becomes advantageous. It's nice to have Mr. Barr helping undo some of the damage he's done but I think I'm still in the second camp.