Thompson Draws Their Fire

I predicted it would be short matter of time until the Enemy Media took notice of the Colin Powell-like dalliance of former Senator Fred Thompson with a run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and launched pre-emptive strikes. Yesterday the always dependable Los Angeles Times fired the first salvo:

Ronald Reagan became president even though he worked with chimps in B movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger played a murderous robot, and that didn't keep him from becoming governor. So can Law & Order actor and former Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) become the first presidential candidate with this credit: Thompson played a white supremacist, spewing anti-Semitic comments and fondling an autographed copy of Mein Kampf on a television drama nineteen years ago.

I did say yesterday that it is getting difficult to parody these people. The above lede should provide redundant evidence as to why.

I'll continue for a bit longer just to let the idiocy marinate a spell:

His colleagues say that he was just an actor putting everything he had into playing the role of a charismatic racist, named Knox Pooley, in three episodes of CBS' hit show Wiseguy in 1988. "Do you call Tom Cruise a killer because he played one in a movie?" asked show creator and writer Stephen J. Cannell.

"His colleagues say..." Like they're trying to cover up for him or something. Thus does common sense get smeared along with the man it oughtn't need to defend.

The Times freudianly tips its plans in the next graf:

But in the age of YouTube, this performance could raise an intriguing political question: How does a performer eyeing a presidential run deal with a video history that can be downloaded, taken out of context, chopped into embarrassing pieces and then distributed endlessly though cyberspace?

Um...by pointing out that that was a guest television role he played twenty years ago, and has about as much bearing on his real life views as Cap'n Crunch's crunchetizing has to the combat capabilities of the United States Navy. Has the Times forgotten about Dan Rather and the Texas Air National Guard caper? It's not like the blogosphere doesn't have the grassroots fact-checking capabilities the "professional" press abandoned years ago.

"Not only do politicians have to worry about getting comfortable with a crowd and saying something that might be caught on tape," said USC professor Leo Braudy, a pop culture expert, who has written extensively about film. "Now actors who have political aspirations will have to go through every single line of every part they played to make sure there's nothing they need to explain or apologize for."

"Conservative" actors, he means. And that's bullbleep. It's just another double-standard to be applied only to Republican actors while Dem actors - of which there are a whole lot more - will never be subjected to such low blow cheap shots.

This confirms for me what I already suspected: the libs fear a Fred Thompson candicacy (and here's a big reason why). With all the reports of the GOP nominating electorate being less than thrilled with the rafter of hopefuls currently declared, they want to make sure that nobody like...well, Senator Thompson, can make a big splash and gain enough momentum to actually become a bona fide threat to a Clinton White House restoration.

If this is the best they can do in that regard, they're off to an awfully sad start. But it is the harbinger of things to come, one way or another.