The Dim Bulbs of Leftism
By Bruce Walker (07/18/07)
Rachel Alexander at Intellectual Conservative recently posted a wonderful note about the desperation of the Left in coming up with anything bad about Fred Thompson. His lovely wife, the mother of two of his children, an attorney who had a successful career before marrying Fred, a woman who is over forty is touted as Thompson’s "trophy wife." Rachel rightly notes that if this is the best that the Left can come up with to slime Fred Thompson, then 2008 looks like it could turn out to be great.
The recent efforts of the Left to pile on Thompson show just how truly dim the bulbs of Leftism have become. I have noted in recent articles that Thompson as a lawyer and as a lobbyist has been “accused” of representing clients who were not nice people. The constitutional right of everyone to have competent representation, even when the client is not likeable or even good, has long been part of the dogma of the Left.
Abraham Lincoln represented bad people, and it is certain that the client list of the Rose Law Firm, where Hillary was a partner and worked for years, would doubtless produce a long list of rich corporate crooks, violent criminals, and other snakes in the grass. Yet no one has – yet – seriously suggested that the many bad people represented by Hillary’s law firm should be a campaign issue.
Hillary also was a director of the Legal Services Corporation in the 1970s, and the list of clients which this organization represented into child molesters, wife batterers, physically abusive mothers, and a wide range of the most unsavory people in American society. Should that be a campaign issue?
Perhaps the most comical effort of the Left to find any slime to use against Fred Thompson appeared on July 16 at the CBS News website. Fred Thompson chose to make his Senate records public. CBS News admonishes its readers that these records are full of surprising positions and statements that will doubtless cause all of us doo-doos in Flyover Country, the conservative majority of America, to see Fred as phony.
As with all of the childish venom of the Left, I could not make up the “allegations” in this latest hit piece on Thompson. Ready? Fred Thompson told the Concord Coalition that he was in favor of a balanced budget, but that he could not support the particular plan proposed by that group because it called for higher taxes. See! Thompson is a hypocrite, because any good Leftist knows that the only way to reduce deficit spending is to raise taxes (Fred, you are such a phony!)
Also, Thompson is opposed to abortion, but would place no litmus test on the appointment of federal judges. Gotcha again, Fred! You wish to appoint brilliant men and women of integrity to the federal bench, like John Roberts and Sam Alito, instead of flacks who will always vote against abortion. How could conservatives possibly trust you? (Forget, for the moment, that Fred Thompson guided the nomination of John Roberts through the Senate, assuming that the dim bulbs at CBS News were even aware of that fact.)
The next “proof” of Fred’s hypocrisy is almost surreal. It is to journalism what “Plan Nine from Outer Space” is to film. Even though Thompson has appeared for years in film and on a highly successful television show, Senator Thompson wrote to Tennesseans for the Arts that “While I support funding for the arts, I will have no choice but to support reduced funding for the National Endowment for the Arts without suitable guidelines.”
This is, of course, evidence of Fred’s nobility. Rather than tell an advocacy group in his own state that he will strongly consider their advice or that he is still weighing the merits of public funding for the arts, Thompson stands up to them and tells them that he will not do what they want him to do. The fact that Fred Thompson, in the private sector, was a successful actor connects with absolutely nothing in the CBS poke at him, except, perhaps, to show by example that art can flourish without public funding.
The final irony of all this? Thompson could have kept his Senate records from the public. As an effort to show that the real Fred Thompson has already stood up and that he is true and real, the former Senator Thompson allowed the dim bulbs of the Left to peruse his Senate files. What did they find? Nothing. What did they prove? That they are growing dimmer by the minute.
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