And A Hearty F-You, Billo

Via S,N!



I'm really starting to hate the kind of unthinking American exceptionalism that has destroyed our ability to advance as a society. Does anyone seriously think that this is the best we can do?

Do We Need Another One Of These?

I really don't think America is going to be willing to again choose a President who can be credibly described as dumb as hell.

Fred Thompson gained an image as a tough-minded investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. Yet President Nixon and his top aides viewed the fellow Republican as a willing, if not too bright, ally, according to White House tapes [...]

Thompson, then 30, was appointed counsel by his political mentor, Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, the top Republican on the Senate investigative committee. Thompson had been an assistant U.S. attorney in Nashville, Tenn., and had managed Baker's re-election campaign. Thompson later was a senator himself.

Nixon was disappointed with the selection of Thompson, whom he called "dumb as hell." The president did not think Thompson was skilled enough to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outsmarted by the committee's Democratic counsel.

This assessment comes from audio tapes of White House conversations recently reviewed by The Associated Press at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and transcripts of those discussions that are published in "Abuse of Power: The New Watergate Tapes," by historian Stanley Kutler.

"Oh s---, that kid," Nixon said when told by his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, of Thompson's appointment on Feb. 22, 1973.

"Well, we're stuck with him," Haldeman said.

This story is a kind of follow-up to this week's revelation that Thompson was a mole inside the Senate Judiciary Committee, leaking to the White House what the committee knew about Nixon's wrongdoing. Nixon's lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt was helping Thompson interrogate and discredit witnesses. So he was a spy but an exceedingly stupid one. Maybe that's why he was unsuccessful in saving Nixon's butt.

"We've got a pretty good rapport with Fred Thompson," Buzhardt told Nixon in an Oval Office meeting on June 6, 1973. The meeting included a discussion of former White House counsel John Dean's upcoming testimony before the committee.

Dean, the committee's star witness, had agreed to tell what he knew about the break-in and cover-up if he was granted immunity against anything incriminating he might say.

Nixon expressed concern that Thompson was not "very smart."

"Not extremely so," Buzhardt agreed.

"But he's friendly," Nixon said.

Seeing the lengths to which Thompson was willing to carry water for Tricky Dick, maybe paid Nixon apologist Hugh Hewitt will dump Multiple Choice Mitt Romney and stroll over to Frederick's of Hollywood.

The portrait in this article is of Thompson, at 30, as a partisan hack of the highest order, with no mind of his own whatsoever. And that tracks with this account of Thompson's appearance at a Young Republicans conference this weekend. Would anyone with half a brain, who's been paying any kind of attention over the past 6 years, ever say anything like this?

In his speech, Thompson fired up the crowded when he said he was the top target of The New York Times and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said the United States was the greatest country, and that set the audience off, too.

"I'm getting tired of having to apologize for the United States of America around the world," Thompson said. "I'm tired of other people's perceptions that we need to apologize."

You know, I'm tried of apologizing for the United States myself, but considering we haven't done so once in the past six years, despite secret prisons, botched invasions, warrantless wiretapping, torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, denial of habeas corpus, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, alienating allies by calling them "Old Europe," lying America into war, lying to the world at the UN, 50 years of illegal covert actions on behalf of American empire, etc., maybe we should practice a little humility for a change.

But that wouldn't mean anything to Thompson because he's too dumb as hell to look beyond his narrow partisan worldview. Like Ezra Klein said earlier this week, it'd be like electing Limbaugh. And the last thing we need in the White House is another dim partisan.

(P.S. I've been slamming Thompson this week because the information is starting to leak out, no doubt by other Republican candidates. You got a problem with it, blame them)