Posted on 11/04/2007 6:37:35 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
I had said Fred Thompson could do him a lot of good if he passed “the Russert primary” with flying colors.
His campaign had been dismissing the Washington press corps, and implicitly running against the media, refusing to do the things candidates traditionally do (enter early, do five events a day, appear at the New Hampshire debate instead of the Tonight Show). But every once in a while a Washington media institution really does matter, and Meet the Press is one of them. Simply because Tim Russert, without commercial interruption, will throw hardballs and curveballs for a solid half hour, and standard delaying tactics won’t work. Also, his research staff can find every awkward quote from 1974 that every candidate dreads. Generally, a candidate who can handle Meet the Press well can handle just about any other live interview.
This morning I had caught a brief snippet – his discussion of Iraq - and thought he was striking out. I thought the reference to “generals we respect” was so odd, I wondered if he had forgotten David Petraeus’s name.
Having just watched it on the DVR, I thought it was a very, very solid performance. Ground rule double.
My initial shallow thought was that Thompson still looks a bit on the gaunt side. Then, during the interview:
“You’ve lost a lot of weight. Is it health related?”
“Coming from you, Tim, I’ll take that as a compliment.” Ouch. Thompson says no, it’s not health related, it’s just that his wife has him on a diet to watch his cholesterol. He says he had additional tests for his Lymphoma in September and was the results were all clear.
Every once in a while Thompson slipped up - I think he suggested that oil was selling at “nah-eight hundred dollars a barrel”, and I’m wary of his quoted statistic that car bombs in Iraq are down 80 percent – but overall, Thompson was measured, modest, serious, and completely at ease. After a couple of debates, it’s odd to watch a man not trying to squeeze his talking points into an answer, and instead speaking in paragraphs, conversational and informed.
Jen Rubin wrote, “He does not answer questions linearly with a direct answer to the question but rather talks about the subject matter. Some find this thoughtful and other think he is vamping and unfocused.” His talk on Iran was a perfect example, in that Thompson’s position isn’t terribly different from the rest of the field – he doesn’t want to use force, but he’ll keep that option open - but as he talks at length about the risks and benefits and factors that would go into a military strike, the audience, I think, will feel reassuring that if Thompson needs to face that decision, he will have weighed each option carefully.
That voice is fatherly, reassuring, calm. The contrast to Hillary couldn’t be sharper.
I’m going to say ‘well-briefed,’ but I know that will just spur one of the Thompson Associates to call me to tell me that’s not a sign of others briefing him, that’s a sign of Thompson’s own reading and study of the issues.
I was about to say that he was almost too conversational, that he could have used one quip or pithy summation at his views, and then, finally, at the tail end of his question on Schiavo, he summed up, “the less government, the better.”
I’m hearing that David Brody listened to the section on abortion and Thompson’s expression of federalism in this area, and has concluded, “all he needs now is to buy the gun that shoots him in the foot.” Look, if Fred Thompson isn’t pro-life enough for social conservatives, then nobody short of Mike Huckabee is. If Huckabee gets the nomination, great, I’d love to see Hillary Clinton go up against the Republican mirror-image of her husband’s rhetorical skills. But it feels like the past few months have been an escalating series of vetoes from various factions within the GOP. I’ve seen more amiable compromises on the United Nations Security Council.
Let me lay it out for every Republican primary voter. You support the guy you want, you rally for him, you write some checks, you vote in the primaries… and maybe your guy wins, maybe he loses. If the guy who beats your guy is half a loaf, you shrug your shoulders, hope your guy is his running mate, and get ready for the general. Life goes on.
I'll NOT be jettisoning my CORE principles and beliefs, and setting a dangerous precedent for my party and country, by voting for ANY liberal, whether they have a "D", or an "R" after their names... PERIOD.
And that's BECAUSE I love my country, and don't want to see, what has been my party, diluted and demeaned by the very left-wing dogma I've been been fighting and guarding against my entire adult life.
If so-called "republicans", in their ignorance and stupidity, select a liberal RINO like rudy, then they deserve 4 - 8 years of a liberal democrat in the White House.
After the dems screw everything up for 4-8 years, then maybe, our party will realize that it is DIFFERENTIATING OUR PARTY FROM THE LIBERAL DEMS, and NOT running some northeastern liberal with an "R" after his name, that will win us long term power to help get this country back to the way the Founders intended it to be.
We need to purge the RINOs from our "tent", NOT bring more of the bastards on board.
Rudy’s more like a plate of breadcrumbs.
Blah, blah, blah...
A good, effective, President needs smarts, but he also needs BALLS and COMMON SENSE, traits that POS jimma was, and IS, sorely lacking.
Power to us as a group of like-minded ideological thinkers or us as individuals, each free to do what we wish as long as we are not stepping on the liberty of others?
He was making the point that a college campus, like any organization or company, can enact policies as long as they don’t contradict law.
I was OK with his answer, but would have liked it better if he had mentioned that someone with a gun could have stopped the slaughter.
Who’s left? Hillary?
It’s not.
But we also have to consider something.
We want abortion to disappear, right?
What will accomplish that?
A. a strict pro-lifer that will proclaim he’ll outlaw abortion and NOT get elected. Even Bush, who few dispute the pro-life status of, has never said he’d outlaw abortion.
B. a pro-lifer who realizes that the best we can do is overturn Roe and will appoint justices that could make that happen. Then we can decide what to do next.
C. Hillary.
No. He didn't say what you wanted to hear is more like it. If you couldn't understand his simply word stand that's it's up to the states, well.
Let me lay it out for every Republican primary voter. You support the guy you want, you rally for him, you write some checks, you vote in the primaries… and maybe your guy wins, maybe he loses. If the guy who beats your guy is half a loaf, you shrug your shoulders, hope your guy is his running mate, and get ready for the general. Life goes on.
There’s more to conservatism than social issues. There’s also the component of where government needs to be involved and where it doesn’t.
Finally...there’s the fact that overturning Roe has more likelihood of happening than passing any sort of Constitutional amendment banning abortion in this current political climate.
That is exactly what he was saying. He said that unless it violated the state law there SHOULD be persons on campus that can carry guns.
Right after the V tech shooting he wrote at length about the subject.
OK, perhaps I didn’t hear that part correctly. I was working on something else while I was listening.
The way it was explained to me, here, was that true Conservatives need their principles enacted by using government. I kid you not, there are people in this very forum who do not think government to be a problem...well, as long as their desired officials are making and enforcing the legislation and wielding and using the blunt instruments, of course.
I always pose the question this way:
Would you give Hillary the same powers over social legislation you’d give Bush/Hunter/Fred/whoever?
Carter's former Lt. Governor once called him "the most dishonest man I have ever met." So, I would guess he had a hidden agenda as well.
The problem is, once a nation becomes socially “tolerant” on things such as abortion and homosexuality, it will invariably evolve into a socialist, gun grabbing nanny state. The reason leftists place so much emphasis on social issues, and on demonizing the religious right, is that if they win that battle, everything else will fall into place for them.
It’s not a coincidence that the sexual revolution and the Great Society (and the LBJ federal gun grab which set off the anti-gun hysteria) all arose at the same time. Each feuls the other. A nation awash in abortion, sexual depravity, secularism, and other socially liberal attitudes will become a nation of weaklings begging for the nanny state to take care of them.
Well, if she disavowed abortion and took up a clear pro-life stance then "Yes!" Plus it would be kinda neat having free healthcare, more distribution of wealth, and greedy businessmen being forced to give back their profits made through exploitation of people! Oh yeah, she'd also have to rail against immigration and homosexuality, too, and come out in favor of a constitutional marriage amendment and immediate funding for a large wall along our southern border to keep out those damned Mexicans...simply eliminating sh!tty legislation and making it easier for immigrants to come here legally is unacceptable.
[/sarcasm]
Socially conservative socialism and nanny-state-ism is NOT conservatism.
Some here (Mike Huckabee suppporters for an example) forget that.
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