On Fox, he admirably makes the conservatives squirm at the idea that he’ll hurt McCain, and he stands up to a lie about the new FISA bill only being for terror-related surveillance. He takes blame for voting for the Patriot Act.

But he ducks responsibility for the Iraq war vote. He says Bush misled Congress and they had no idea a long-term occupation was the plan. Well, first of all, Ron Paul, whom Barr has said he always looked to on a tough vote, was up there on the floor making the correct, patriotic, libertarian and only ethical position clear: aggressive warfare is wrong, WMD or no; the war claims were all transparent propaganda; the Constitution forbade such a delegation of authority to the president (which was done exactly so legislators could duck responsibility later); and this was clearly going to turn into a long-term disaster. There was no good reason a libertarian should have supported the Iraq war, and all friends of liberty who did so should now agree that the war was indefensible back before it began, too. Especially given the new propaganda and covert war against Iran, and the attempt to lie Americans into another war — which has been the pattern for two centuries — this is not a dead issue. Even if the US had gone in, won the cakewalk, brought democracy to Iraq and left by Christmas 2003, it would have still been an act of aggression to murder Iraqis, most notably by the grotesque and barbaric Shock and Awe campaign in mid-March. Not all libertarians are against having a socialist military establishment in the first place, but all should condemn clear acts of naked aggression, as the Iraq war has been from Day One.