Fred Thompson: Vile Liar. Former Tennessee Senator and more recent actor Fred Thompson was on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno tonite, to announce his candidacy for President. He needn't have bothered. He revealed himself the candidate of the worst of the Old South, jingoist and dishonest. Asked by Leno if he felt we should have gone into Iraq, Thompson apparently surprised the audience by saying he did. He then went on to make the astonishing claim that if we hadn't, Saddam would have continued to defy the United Nations and cause trouble for the United States, and, get this, continued his WMD program and nuclear weapons program! Astounding. Saddam yielded to the international community and ended any WMD and nuclear programs he might once have aspired to, long before he expelled UN inspectors and before liars like Thompson launched an invasion.
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The United States military, weapons inspectors, and intelligence agents of many services have scoured every corner of Iraq, looking for the Weapons of Mass Destruction and nuclear-weapons development programs that Senator Thompson asserts, and found absolutely nothing to justify such accusations. Nothing. Think for a moment. If there were WMD in Iraq, but we didn't find them, wouldn't Al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents have found them, and used them against us?
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But Fred Thompson doesn't care about the truth. He is a Zionist liar who cares so deeply about Israel, which he mentioned twice within two minutes, that he will utter any lie to defend the monstrous Iraq war waged to disrupt Israel's enemies. He even indicated that we need to act to stop Iran before it too can threaten Israel. Fred Thompson wants another Middle East war. That should end his presidential campaign before it starts. Will it?
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Thompson is the candidate of Radical Zionists and Southern yahoos, the kind of cretin who to this day believes that Saddam had WMD and was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Every respectable investigator all over the planet says Saddam did not have WMD, much less a nuclear weapons program, and had absolutely no role in the 9/11 attacks. But Fred Thompson is building his campaign around the militarist white trash crowd. He has apparently calculated that with the electorate splintered on other issues, the yahoo crowd who insist that Saddam had WMD and attacked us on 9/11 will win the nomination for him, and that if the Democratic candidate is a woman or black from the North, his Southern yahoo base, joined to the Zionists in the evangelical movement and Jewish vote, will win the Presidency for him. I hope he is SO wrong as to become an object lesson in future political-science textbooks.
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Thompson comes to his dishonesty honestly. His father was a car salesman, and he himself worked for years as a personal-injury lawyer and defense lawyer for white-collar criminals. He's used to lying and exaggerating a tiny kernel of truth into a huge lie.
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Fred Thompson is part of the unregenerate, unapologetic Old South of regressive politics swathed in uncritical patriotism. Any lie will win the day, as long as it wraps itself in the flag and respect for our brave men (and, now, women) in arms who have 'selflessly and patriotically sacrificed more for others than any other country, ever' — the one thing he said that got a big rise out of the audience, even in Southern California. He is attempting to appeal to the worst in us, while the rest of the presidential field split the vote of the best of us.
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Fortunately, Thompson is physically very ugly, which bodes badly for him in this age of television and an electorate that is majority female. Ugly people don't do very well in politics nowadays. We want our politicians to be pretty people, of both sexes. Why else would John Edwards spend hundreds of dollars on a haircut, and Hillary Clinton show cleavage?
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One of the reasons Dennis Kucinich is dismissed out of hand is that he is physically unprepossessing: short, unsexy, and at best ordinary-looking. Thompson is tall but plainly old, very wrinkled, with bags under his eyes and a nose that looks OK from the front but which is seriously hooked as seen from the side. He is nearly hideous, almost painful to look at. That will work against him, because people have to look at him all during the campaign, and at the back of their mind they will dread having to look at him every nite on television news for the next four years if he wins the White House. And yes, we are that superficial.
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We are animals — sexual animals. We like pretty and don't like ugly. There's even an expression, "God don't like ugly." Altho the excuse for the expression is that "ugly" here refers to negative character traits, not physical appearance, the word "ugly" does in fact relate to appearance. The expression could have employed nonphysical words, like "nasty", "selfish", "vicious", but it employs the word "ugly".
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We may say "Beauty is only skin-deep" and talk about "inner beauty", but no matter how we try to disown it, the fact is that physical appearance matters. Inconsequential debates or straw polls are called "beauty contests" for good reason.
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I will be intrigued to see how people in politics and media react tomorrow to Fred Thompson's shameless repetition of old lies about Iraq tonite. Will his opponents take him to task and try to break thru the thick, dishonest heads of the yahoos of the Nation? Or is it hopeless? If the other candidates allow Thompson to get away with these shameless, evil lies, they consign themselves to be damaged by his resurrecting these utterly discredited, phony issues. And if the other candidates can't get thru to Americans, how on Earth are they going to get thru to the Arab man in the street and other people around the world whom they must get thru to if they become President?
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This was a sad nite for American democracy. Will tomorrow bring better news, of universal condemnation of Fred Thompson's pandering lies and attempts to drum up war fever against Iran? We shall see.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,752 — for Israel.)



- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:45 AM