Over at the Guardian, our friend Jeremy Lott has a great article on the Libertarian Party nomination fight this weekend. My favorite line is, "This ideological rigidity has drawn a self-selected group of freedom's bitter-enders who hate the Federal Reserve and fear the Post Office."

It is this group of "self-selected bitter-enders" that will oppose former congressman Bob Barr's nomination for the presidential race. These are the folks who've spent too many years making unreasonable demands and seeing nothing but failure. They may have enough votes to actually block a Barr nomination, even though it must be clear to all sane observers that Barr brings the most credibility, even if not the most extreme variety of libertarianism.

As Jeremy Lott notes, in the 2004 nomination process, Michael Badnarik beat out two bigger names, radio host Gary Nolan and movie producer Aaron Russo. Nolan was knocked out and subsequently encouraged his supporters to vote for Badnarik. Badnarik, who had never held political office (and didn't possess a driver's license), at one point emailed supporters that he had gotten word that Hawaii had just seceded from the Union. This apparently was due to a mistaken reading of an email he had received from a Hawaiian secessionist group. Badnarik is a nice person though. He became a better speaker throughout the process. And yes, he had pretty good ideological purity, too. But, no one but LP people even cared he was running.

Depending on what percentage each candidate enters with, the last-man standing voting procedure the LP uses could actually could enable Wayne Allen Root or even Mary Ruwart to win the nomination. The party would earn obscurity for this choice, a decision it has made time and time again.

/KDR