The Fear Of Fred, Continued
Let’s see if I’ve got this straight:
***Arent Fox, the left-leaning D.C. law firm for which Fred Thompson served as token right-winger during the Bush41 Administration, billed the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association for nineteen hours over fourteen months aggregating about five grand for FDT’s consultations with AF’s actual NFPRHA lobbyist, Michael Barnes - then AF partner and [correction: former] Donk congressman from Maryland and one of the sources of this non-story. Also, Thompson spent three hours on the phone with unidentified Bushies.
And this is supposed to prove….what? That Ready Freddie rummages through abortuary dumpsters in his spare time? That the Times considers lobbyists to be reprehensible when they’re not Democrats?
Suggests to me that they want to see Rudy Giuliani as the GOP nominee because they think it’ll split the party, and consider FDT the biggest threat to that outcome.
***New Republic senior editor Michelle Cottle thinks that Senator Thompson’s grassroots popularity springs from a latent sissy-britches tendency he inspires in conservatives, which will crush all us right-wing tail-gunners when the Queen of Masculinity wipes the fruited plain with his candy caboose. Or something like that.
The conclusion? Same as the old one - the New York Times and New Republic, like Mrs. Clinton and Mitt Romney and a whole cavalcade of others, have had the Fear of Fred put into them.
Makes you wonder whether FDT’s becoming an official candidate would exacerbate it or spoil the magic.
I have my own theory, but it’ll keep for now.
UPDATE: Am to understand from J-Ger that every Republican presidential candidate should go back through his/her personal, professional, and political history, compile and publish a complete laundry list of anything and everything s/he has ever said or done that the other side might conceivably use against them? In essence, to do the Dems’ and Enemy Media’s opposition research for them?
Well, not quite. He says Thompson should have done so regarding his “abortion lobbying” once the original L.A. Times story surfaced. I say bohunk. Whatever happened to staying on message and not dignifying empty, de minimus opposition attacks?
Actually, it reminds me of when an urban legend surfaced in the summer of 1999 about then-Governor Bush’s supposed past cocaine use. A “story” clearly designed to take down what the other side perceived as a serious threat to Democrat retention of the White House in 2000. Bush didn’t dignify it because it was bogus slander, and it fizzled.
Yes, the generation-old DUI story five days before the election did almost sabotage Dubya at the finish, and if he’d gotten the info out there long before, it would have been neutralized. But can there really be such an equivalent lobbying skeleton in Fred’s closet? I can’t imagine anything that would be more damaging to his proto-candidacy than his enthusiastic support of campaign finance reform, and that info is already in the public domain.
