Bob Barr gets something right

... and that's news, though less so lately.

"It probably wasn't any one thing," he said during our conversation last week outside the White House.

"But perhaps listening to the attorney general of the United States, in a purportedly conservative Republican administration of George W. Bush, justify to the American people that the writ of habeas corpus, the great writ, the foundation of civilized society as we know it, is no longer important. Watching a president and his attorney general try and torture the language of the law and the language of the Fourth Amendment to justify warrantless spying on American citizens in their own country in the name of being a commander in chief.

"Those are so dramatically inconsistent with any notions of legitimate, constitutional, conservative government, that I certainly could not be party to, or remain in a party that advocated those procedures."

Aside from the misplaced esteem for conservatism, he gets everything right.