Character or Caricature?
Published by BG on Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 10:01 AM.Glenn Greenwald - Salon - Fred Thompson -- "tough guy" and "folksy cultural conservative"
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I've said before that Thompson's association with The American Enterprise Institute essentially means he's a proponent of the neoconservative agenda, or at minimum believes them to be credible and intelligent people with an agreeable worldview. Since neocons got us into this foreign policy nightmare, and since they've been incredibly wrong at nearly every turn in their punditry, this association should be used by his opponents to tar him early and often as just another version of GWB. Since it's obvious that he agrees with Bush's Iraq policy and the way he's running the war, that shouldn't be a difficult task at all.
Newsweek's Howard Fineman -- last seen expressing admiration for the "reassuring" "male" qualities exuded by the GOP presidential field -- was on Hardball last night heaping praise on Fred Thompson. According to Fineman, Thompson not only is "tough on defense," but he himself is "a tough guy." Fineman also swooned: "He's got a strong record on cultural issues as a cultural conservative from the South."
What, in Fineman's mind, makes Thompson "tough on defense" and gives him credibility as "a tough guy"? Fineman obviously means that as a high compliment, but what -- in actuality -- has Thompson ever done that makes him a "tough guy"?
Here is Thompson's biography -- his own official, endorsed version. He's been a government lawyer, an actor and a Senator. Though Thompson does not mention it, he also has been -- for two decades -- what a 1996 profile in The Washington Monthly described as "a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests." This folksy, down-home, regular guy has spent his entire adult life as a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, except when he was an actor in Hollywood. And -- like the vast, vast majority of Republican "tough guys" who play-act the role so arousingly for our media stars, from Rudy Giuliani to Newt Gingrich -- Thompson has no military service despite having been of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War (Thompson turned 20 in 1962, Gingrich in 1963, Guiliani in 1964). He was active in Republican politics as early as the mid-1960s, which means he almost certainly supported the war in which he did not fight.
So what exactly, in Fineman's eyes, makes Thompson such a "tough guy"?
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"Toughness" can be demonstrated by actually fighting in a war. "Toughness" is demonstrated when a political candidate tells people what they do not want to hear. "Toughness" is not demonstrated by sending other people to war. But people like Fineman (i.e., media purveyors of Beltway conventional wisdom) reflexively, and incoherently, equate blind militarism and warmongering with "toughness" even though it is anything but.
This is what Thompson said last month when interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News:
WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?
THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing.
I've said before that Thompson's association with The American Enterprise Institute essentially means he's a proponent of the neoconservative agenda, or at minimum believes them to be credible and intelligent people with an agreeable worldview. Since neocons got us into this foreign policy nightmare, and since they've been incredibly wrong at nearly every turn in their punditry, this association should be used by his opponents to tar him early and often as just another version of GWB. Since it's obvious that he agrees with Bush's Iraq policy and the way he's running the war, that shouldn't be a difficult task at all.
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