Thompson enthusiasts having second thoughts

During the boomlet for Fred (Conservative Man on a Horse) Thompson during the last couple of months, I have consistently said that I don’t think Thompson is very capable, or smart, or conservative, or, indeed, serious about anything. That has been a minority view among conservatives understandably desperate to find an acceptable candidate.

But now my opinion finds some confirmation at the establishmentarian blog Powerline:

The Fred Thompson campaign recently set up an event for 60 of Congress’s most solid conservatives. Many of them were hoping to be able to endorse Thompson. Unfortunately, Thompson did not impress the Congressmen. He did not appear to be ready for a tough Presidential campaign. One of his aides explained that Thompson was “rusty,” which, as one Congressman told me, did not inspire much confidence in this YouTube era. Some of those who attended are now looking at Mitt Romney as the most viable conservative in the race.

No kidding he’s rusty. After a career as a lawyer, then another career as a movie actor, he had eight years in the U.S. Senate, then, at the age of 60, he returned to acting, in a hyper-liberal tv show whose conscience is the eternally whiny and self-righteous D.A. played by Sam Waterston. Thompson’s resumption of his acting career after being a U.S. senator indicates a lack of seriousness about public affairs, and the extremely liberal slant of the show in which he performs indicates a lack of seriousness about conservatism.

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David B. writes:

I have a friend, a self-described paleocon, who met Fred Thompson a few times when he was a senator. He is skeptical and says, “The same people who were behind Bush are behind Thompson.”

The last couple of years, I have tried to watch the Law and Order TV show about a dozen times. They never, and I mean never, had a black or Hispanic defendant. Could a real-life prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office spend his career with exclusively white defendants as the whiny Sam Waterston character does?

Michael S. writes from Sweden:

The North American Union is just as much a threat to the U.S. as a nation-state as illegal immigration, and no politician who is for NAFTA, although he may be critical of illegal immigration, can be trusted or seen as a patriot. Ergo, Fred Thompson is no more a patriot than McCain or Bush!

As Brian Farmer writes at the website of the John Birch Society:

[M]ost disturbing to any true conservative is the fact that Fred Thompson is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Why this is disturbing can be summarized by the words of Admiral Chester Ward, who was invited into CFR membership and was shocked by what he discovered. According to Admiral Ward, the CFR has as its goal the “submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.” He also wrote that “this lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership.”

See also this and this and this.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 29, 2007 10:13 AM | Send