Posted on 04/25/2007 9:51:07 AM PDT by APRPEH
Ok there, I said it. As far as I know (I mean I have not googled the phrase or anything) I may be the first one to say it publicly and truly mean it. It has a nice ring to it doesn't it? Well... Get used to it.
Think about this for a second. Thompson is going to run, all bulletins point that direction. When he gets in the primary all the polls seem to indicate he will quickly eclipse the Republican field. Like it or not (supporters of other candidates) there was a recent poll that showed that 4 out of ten Republican primary voters just were not happy with the current field. Oh sure they will vote for some of the others in a straw poll, but most readers of NWR understand the difference between deep support and broad shallow support.
Some in the conservative opinion world have attempted to take a mild swipe at Thompson. What happened? Well by golly Thompson swiped back and did so in a thoughtful and witty way. Maggie Gallagher deftly describes the exchange between Thompson and the "fourth wall."
(Excerpt) Read more at nwrepublican.blogspot.com ...
I sure hope you don’t think Hillary as President is something to yawn at!!!!
That would be PURE HELL.
I see nothing wrong with being friends with someone you don’t always agree with - I don’t agree on everything with anybody...nothing wrong with that. To me, Fred isn’t at all like McCain.
Sure you can have friends. But when your friend is a anti-first ammendment loon politician like McCain it’s something worth questioning. What if he gets the nod and picks McCain for his running mate? What if he listens to McCain at all during his presidency (assuming it gets that far)? That’s a big issue, at least if you live in AZ and have lots of good reasons to despise McCain.
I didn’t say anything about anyone as president, I was discussing them as candidates. As a candidate Hillary is pretty dull, lots on the left don’t like, plenty in the middle don’t like her, and she’s not shown any ability to run the kind of campaign that excites the voters.
According to a previous poster McCain and Fred voted identically over 80% of the time. Plus McCain says Fred was instrumental in getting McCain-Feingold passed. That’s plenty of similarities.
If you think Fred is some kind of toady, don’t vote for him, I guess.
I will put my faith in a man who has the fortitude to be the lone dissenting vote in several 99-1 senate votes. That kind of man won’t be pushed around by anyone.
That is ABSOLUTELY ridiculous. You are going to have a similar
percentage of agreeing votes in pretty much any two people in the same party.
I’m not saying he’s some sort of toady, I’m saying that I’m not excited about him and his relationship with McCain is the reason I’m not. If he excites you good for you, I find the whole field downright lame.
Uhh except you don’t. You don’t have McCain listing off the all the other same party members as instrumental in passing his First Ammendment destroying piece of crap.
What?
It’s pretty straight forward, you said the agreements in votes between McCain and Fred are just how it works with guys in the same party, the voting record shows that’s just not how it works. And I reminded you of one agreement that makes me ill. I can’t get behind anyone that supported McCain-Feingold, I especially can’t get behind anyone that McCain said was instrumental in getting that hunk of crap passed. Just can’t do it. I don’t care if they said later it was a mistake, it’s a First Ammendment destroying piece of legislation and anybody that couldn’t see then that it was a terrible law doesn’t get to impress me with their hindsight.
Show me a comparison of the votes of two other Republicans from a similar place on the spectrum that does not have a high correlation, then.
“McCain, for example, grew increasingly less conservative in recent years. He started with annual conservative scores consistently in the 80s when he first went to the Senate in 1987, dipped to the 70s during the mid- 1990s, into the 60s in the late 1990s and into the 50s starting in 2004.”
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16935220.htm
So, when Fred had a fairly high correlation with him, McCain had a much more conservative record.
No, because it doesn’t matter. It’s a non-issue. They agreed on McCain-Feingold and that’s as bad as it gets. Every other vote by both of them could be absolutely perfect, in complete agreement with every whim of my mind and I wouldn’t like either of them because of McCain-Feingold. It’s a bad law, proposed by a loon, and heavily supported by Fred. In my book that makes McCain completely unacceptable and Fred not particularly desirable. Sorry if that bothers you but those are the facts.
You really have an unhealthy obsession with red herrings here. McCain-Feingold is the only one that matters. That was McCain’s big step away from respecting the Consititution, and Fred was instrumental in getting it passed.
You started out worrying that McCain would be unduly influencing Fred in some way. I was trying to say that Fred is his own man. I was addressing that point. Just because you decided to focus on something else, doesn’t make my point a “red herring”.
No, I started out the same place I’ve finished, that Fred’s support of McCain-Feingold and overall friendship with McCain causes me to view him as McCain without the insanity and frankly I didn’t like much McCain before he started going goofy. I never said anything about Fred not being his own man, or “undue influence”. McCain could become a big dog if Fred makes the trip, it’s easy to see Fred picking his friend for the VP slot or just generally raising McCain’s stature and pushing the party to give him a bigger leadership role in the Senate. That would be bad. I don’t want McCain in the Senate anymore at all, which is why I regularly vote against him in the primaries and if the Dems would put forth a candidate that didn’t suck (say a Zell Miller clone) I’d vote against McCain in the general too, I especially don’t want him to get any kind of promotion.
This is why Fred doesn’t excite me, he has too close a set of ties to a politician I just plain don’t like. Maybe campaigning against each other will damage their friendship, given their similarities if Fred actually runs they’re going to have to do something to seperate themselves in the eyes of voters. If McCain bows out and doesn’t throw his support to Fred I’ll take that as a good sign, unless something like that happens Fred’s on my “ehn” list, he’s not horrible but not what I’d call good either.
I’m not saying he should get rid of his friends that he disagrees with politically. My problem is what he and McCain AGREE on politically, that being Campaign Finance Reform (aka First Ammendment crippling).
I’m not asking for any kind of litmus test at all. I’m simply pointing out reality. Anybody that respects the Constitution should hate McCain-Feingold, and subsequently not support McCain because he made it a priority of his political career. According to McCain Fred was instrumental in getting that law passed, while I’m not saying that’s a slam dunk reason not to support Fred I am saying that’s a reason to not be terribly excited about Fred. The ongoing friendship is just salt in the wound, the wound is that he was a key supporter to a bad law.
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