Reason Magazine - The Unbearable Lightness of Fred
The Big Voice announces for president.
I’m not much of a conspiracy freak, but I am a realist about how politics operates in this day and age, and when I suddenly see identically-styled attacks coming from wildly different sources, I have to conclude something is up.
Case in point: Libertarian mag Reason’s Dave Weigel offers up a badly-researched - no, an entirely unresearched and unsupported - slam at “Light Fred” on September 7.
On September 8, Giuliani flack Rick Brookhiser blurts an almost identical rant about “Done-Nothing Fred.”
And immediately after Fred declared, the Romney campaign put up a web site chock full of such thoughtful political arguments against Thompson as “dubbing the former TV star and senator Fancy Fred, Five O’clock Fred, Flip-Flop Fred, McCain Fred, Moron Fred, Playboy Fred, Pro-Choice Fred, Son-of-a-Fred and Trial Lawyer Fred.”
Now, three instances in a week or so don’t make a trend, but they may make a leading indicator. My hunch is that everybody has had their oppo research teams combing over Fred’s entire life story since it became obvious that Thompson would eventually enter the race, but they didn’t come up with much they could convincingly attack him with.
So, absent any cogent arguments, and near-paralyzed with terror and desperation (Rasmussen overnight now has Thompson in a clear lead over the rest of the GOP field with 28% to Giuliani’s 21%, and continuing to widen his lead every day) his opponents are resorting to the oldest political strategy in the book: Fling feces. Lots and lots of feces.
And you know how those monkeys are - see, and do.
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Heck, Bill, they’re even planting their poop in gossip columns. This is from today’s NY Post, via Cindy Adams:
LISTEN, we should discuss Fred Thompson or we should pretend it never happened? A candidate in time of war announcing his plan to heal us and speak to the issues of life and death and soldiers dying - on the Jay Leno comedy hour? Shtick is no platform. Delegates weren’t in the audience that night. They were in New Hampshire. His agents should have told the actor that Nielsen doesn’t determine a presidential race, delegates do. Walking a red carpet on a talk show not the same as walking a thin line in a political debate. We’re talking steak, not sizzle. New Hampshire will not look kindly on being passed over for Hollywood. Since 1776, this country’s voters expect to be taken seriously - not snubbed.
New Hampshire is a pissant little state with a bloated sense of self-importance due solely to having an insignificant primary at the beginning of the pack.
And you can expect to be taken seriously all you want - but when half the Democratic voters in the country think 9/11 is a Bush conspiracy, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Anyway, I’ll give New Hampshire some respect when more voters vote in its primary than watch Jay Leno every night.
As for Cindy Adams, I try very hard never to use her name and “respect” in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence, but just this once, I’ll make the exception.