Fred Thompson aided Nixon on Watergate - Yahoo! News

Nixon was disappointed with the selection of Thompson, whom he called “dumb as hell.”

Apparently the Clinton campaign has decided that, lacking anything of substance with which to attack, it will try to paint Fred Thompson as “dumb.”

The first thing that springs to mind is that Democrats paint all Republicans as dumb, pretty much without exception. And since when did Democrats start taking their arch-demon’s (Nixon’s) word about anything? Nixon may have considered himself much smarter than Thompson, but history, I expect, would judge that differently, given how Nixon himself is judged today.

The next question is, who do the Democrats consider smart? Well, I remember all their drooling about Jimmy Carter, the “nuclear engineer,” who will probably go down as the worst President of the 20th century, and they thought John Kerry was pretty bright, too: As Howell Raines, former NYT Executive Editor wrote in 2004:

One highly imperfect but salient way to do so is at the level of campaign tactics. Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I’m sure the candidates’ SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead

This was shortly before it was revealed that Bush’s grade point average was actually higher than Kerry’s (or Gore’s, for that matter). But the Democrats kept on with their mantra of the “dumb Republican” because, well, as far as Democrats are concerned, all Republicans are “dumb” - apparently because they aren’t “smart” enough to become Democrats.

Still, even Howell Raines was enough in touch with reality to point out the incongruities:

After four decades of newspapering, including covering the “dumb” Ronald Reagan and the “smart” Jimmy Carter, I am not unsympathetic to the problems of trying to inform the public on this touchiest of competency issues. Big news organizations are captives of our own rules of fairness. Voters are doubly disadvantaged, by both a paucity of information in campaign coverage and by the elusive nature of the evidence about the kinds of intelligence that matter in our leaders.

My generation of White House correspondents was accused of covering up Ronald Reagan’s supposed stupidity and his reliance on fictional “facts” derived from Errol Flynn movies and the John Birch Society. In 1981 Clark Clifford, the Democratic “wise man,” entertained Georgetown dinner parties with the killer line that Reagan was “an amiable dunce.” Twenty years later we know that Clark Clifford was charged in a banking scandal and the dunce ended the Cold War.

We also know how “smart” Bill Clinton turned out to be.

Let’s face the brutal truth. The GOP could nominate Albert Einstein, and every Democrat (and that includes the mainstream media, which is almost entirely Democrat, as in the above hit piece) would claim he was dumber than Paris Hilton, because Democrats say that about every Republican candidate. Which leads to an interesting question: If the Democrats think Fred Thompson is so dumb, how come they’re so scared of him?

I’ll tell you why. It is because Democrats think most voters are dumb, too. Their proof? The “dumb” voting public keeps right on electing Republicans.

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