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Demented-crats Apparently Fear Fred Thompson
By Peter Brown
When one political party tries to influence the other's presidential primary race the reasonable assumption is that someone is trying to stop the nomination of a candidate that party does not want to face in November.
That's why a Democrat-aligned group injecting itself into the Republican campaign by alleging that Fred Thompson lobbied for abortion rights is a pretty good indication the other side thinks he has serious potential.
Thompson has become a force in the GOP polls even though almost half of Republicans and more than half the rest of the electorate say they don't know enough about him to form an opinion.
In this case his Democratic foes are trying to define him negatively for GOP voters before he can make a good first impression.
That's why in the last few weeks we have seen a stream of stories that would seem to be aimed at derailing his candidacy. Some were clearly planted in the news media with information from partisans of other candidates or causes. Others may have arisen independently from a news media itching to vet Thompson.
The former Tennessee senator and movie/TV actor had experienced a sharp rise in the polls, making everyone take seriously what only months ago might have seemed a flight of fancy.
Thompson runs a consistent second among Republican voters nationally and in most states. In many southern states he leads GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
So far he trails the major Democratic contenders in trial heats, but given voters' lack of familiarity with him at least some Democrats are worried he could be difficult to beat in November should he win the GOP nomination.
Thompson's candidacy has reshaped the campaign so much that even before he officially announced, adversaries were seeking to undermine his candidacy.
Most interesting - and perhaps most telling of his potential - was the effort by a Democrat-aligned abortion rights group to tarnish his credentials among social conservatives, who are a large part of the GOP primary electorate.
And don't forget it is the Democratic National Commitee -- not his GOP competitors -- that is suggesting the Federal Election Commission cite him for campaign law violations because he has allegedly been abusing his "testing the waters" committee to effectively run for president without having to disclose contributors and spending.
The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association claimed that Thompson had lobbied the White House on its behalf in 1991. Thompson denied the charge, and John Sununu, who was White House chief of staff at the time, backed up Thompson.
Only time will tell which side eventually turns out to be perceived as being truthful by the electorate. But regardless of the truth of the allegation, its presence is remarkable at this stage of the race.
Memory does not produce a similar case where an interest group tied to one of the major political parties sought so overtly to influence the debate and outcome of the other parties' nomination fight, especially before a candidate even formally announced.
Think how unusual it would be if, for instance, a conservative group opposed to immigration reform that would allow any legalization of those here illegally claimed that Sen. Barack Obama, before he was in the Senate, had been active in anti-Hispanic activities.
In that mythical case it would be Republicans trying to damage Obama's reputation with a key Democratic voting block, Hispanics - just as the current allegations about Thompson are aimed at planting doubt about him among GOP-leaning Christian conservatives.
Also appearing in the news media in recent weeks has been a report on files that showed Richard Nixon critical of Thompson's abilities as a Senate investigator during Watergate.
Those files also led the news media to raise questions about whether Thompson showed a previously unknown willingness to cooperate with the White House in a way that might benefit Nixon. Such questions would undermine the positive benefits to Thompson's candidacy of his service as a lawyer for the Senate Watergate Committee, where he revealed that Nixon had a secret Oval Office taping system.
Other media reports in recent days also put the spotlight on Thompson's wife, Jeri, who is 24 years younger than he, and attractive enough that one TV talk show compared her to a stripper.
Presidential politics is a contact sport.
The coming months will show whether Thompson can take a hit and keep on fighting.
And, if he is smart, he will look both to the right and the left when he is crossing the street.
Peter A. Brown is assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. He can be reached at peter.brown@quinnipiac.edu
Real Clear Politics ~ Peter Brown ** Dems Apparently Fear Thompson
Related: Cybercast News Service ~ Fred Lucas **
Thompson's Rising Star Becomes Target as Formal Announcement Looms
The more the libtard lamestream media attacks Fred, the more I like him!
Cultural Marxism
Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.
By the end of WWI, socialists realized that something was amiss, for the world's proletariat had not heeded Marx's call to rise up in opposition to evil capitalism and to embrace communism instead. They wondered what had gone wrong.
Gramsci posited that because Christianity had been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, not only was it fused with Western civilization, but it had corrupted the workers class. The West would have to be de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a "long march through the culture." Additionally, a new proletariat must be created. In his "Prison Notebooks," he suggested that the new proletariat be comprised of many criminals, women, and racial minorities.
Hungary's youth, having been fed a steady diet of values-neutral (atheism) and radical sex education while simultaneously encouraged to rebel against all authority, easily turned into delinquents ranging from bullies and petty thieves to sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.
The primary goal of the Frankfurt School was to translate Marxism from economic terms into cultural terms. It would provide the ideas on which to base a new political theory of revoltuion based on culture, harnessing new oppressed groups for the faithless proletariat. Smashing religion, morals, It would also build a constituency among academics, who could build careers studying and writing about the new oppression.
The pernicious influence of Adorno's ‘authoritarian personality' idea can be clearly seen in some of the research that gets public money.
The Orwellian cast of the pathologies named shows how far Gramsci's long march has led us.
Critical Theory is an ongoing and brutal assault via vicious criticism relentlessly leveled against Christians, Christmas, the Boy Scouts, Ten Commandments, our military, and all other aspects of traditional American culture and society.
Double-thinking ‘fence-sitters', otherwise known as moderates, centrists, and RINOs bear the imprint of these psychological ‘obedience' techniques. These people-in some cases literally afraid of incurring the wrath of name-calling obedience trainers -- have opted to straddle the fence lest they be found guilty of possessing an opinion, one way or another. At the merest hint of displeasure from the obedience-trainers, up goes the yellow flag of surrender upon which it is boldly written:
Consequently, and by extension, it also rejects the first principles of our liberty enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. These are our "unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Cultural Marxism must reject these because these principles of liberty "are endowed by our Creator," who made man in His image.
The antidote is courage and the light of truth. If we are to win this cultural war and reclaim and rebuild America so our children and their children's children can live in a ‘Shining City on the Hill' where liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency flourish, we must muster the courage to fearlessly expose the communist Left's revolutionary agenda to the Light of Truth. Truth and the courage to speak it will set us free.
loud
Liberals' attempts to silence me
Protesting the peanut farmer
Liberal hot air
I pointed out that this was just one example of why listening to people who have been proven wrong about forecasts time and again, and letting them dictate how we lived our lives, was insane.
By the way, this upcoming cold snap (which is already being felt today in the West) is a short-term weather variation, just as the recent warm temperatures along the East Coast have been. But arm yourself with this information the next time someone tries to use a warm spell as evidence for the junk science behind the global warming propaganda.
One blogger called for fining me and my station $325,000 for each "offense" so as to shut down our station. Another liberal blogger is lining up activists to do a drill to get Congress to pass a new Fairness Doctrine. Another blogger said they were going to work until they got me "off the air."
Every day for four hours I sit behind a radio microphone, fighting for a better America that promotes freedom, liberty, security, honesty and integrity. That calculates to be about 1,200 minutes every week. That's a total of more than 60,000 minutes each year for 12 years.
Any efforts to silence me are just further proof of how desperate and pathetic liberals have become.
silly
I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction.
An identification guide
2. The social liberal but economic moderate
4. The minority