I WAS TAKING A BREAK ON SATURDAY at Sparky’s yogurt, hunched over a pint of non fat frozen confection smothered in politically correct granola as I read the weekend edition of the SMDP. I went straight to the Opinion/Commentary page as they are right next to the funny papers (coincidence? Naw!!). After reading Lloyd Garver’s smarmy yet pallid lynching of former presidential hopeful Fred Thompson, I was wondering if Llloyd’s brainstem had detached from its moorings. Offering up a smackdown on a man described as “…[not] a popular enough candidate to be coy. Who cared if he was in or not …” seemed overwhelmingly self serving as obviously Lloyd cared enough to engage in a little character sissification of a guy who ran on what little money with which he had to campaign. Clinton has a war chest of a little over $ 80 million. You said that Fred wasn’t really interested in running … more like he was walking, eh? One really could “run” instead of “walk” for president with the kind of cash-ola Billary, oops, Hillary has in her political funderwear drawer.
On an historical note: When Bubba Clinton was wallowing through his impeachment hearings on the peculiar uses with a cigar, then U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson voted against conviction on the charge of perjury. So cut Thompson some slack here, Lloyd. Going after Fred Thompson is like going after the Muppets with a TASER. Are these the vaunted values of the alleged “Party of Tolerance?” Is your disdain because Thompson is Southern (stupid), conservative (stupider), religious (stupid-est) who graduated from Vanderbilt law school or is it because he made more money as an actor than you did as a writer? Rather than go after a “nobody” like Fred Thompson, howzabout going after “somebody” in your own party?
Did you happen to see the debate earli-er in the week? Watching the party that invented “identity politics” spring its own trap of victimology upon itself was better than anything that could have been written on “Family Ties.” We had the white woman shrewishly calling the black man, essentially, a litigious hitman for a Chicago slumlord and the black man volcanically inferring that she was a whore for corporate America. This is politics, dude. This is goooood television.
The Democrats are now the official “Neener-Neener” Party. John Edwards is now official Hall Monitor and Seesaw Police as he seemed to be the only one willing to give Bam-Bam Obama and Pebbles Clinton a well earned time out. Edwards has the most enlightened approach to our problems, other than Joe Biden, and is largely ignored because, well, he is a WHITE MAN!! That women and blacks split along race and gender lines in the South Carolina Democratic Primary after the debate should show that neither leading candidate should be “running” for president and have further split an already dysfunctional Democratic party into a Democratic parody. The proof of that split is in Edwards’ poor showing in a state where he was born [!] and that he carried in the 2004 Presidential elections [!!] Now let me get this straight … Two Yankees, one black man from Illinois and a white woman from New York beat the “favorite son” in his birth state of South Carolina where the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter…Naw, race and gender ain’t got nothing to do with it. Bam-bam and Pebbles posturing that they are more a “victim” than the respective opposition is just so rhetorically flatulent.
Lloyd, you have theories about, “…why … this particular man who not only seemed to have no chance to win…” was campaigning to avoiding joining the picket line for the writer’s strike and possible actor’s strike. My theory is that he probably didn’t want to come down to picket or lend his voice to the struggles of labor because he has such warm and caring folks like you to welcome him. Nothing makes a man want to participate in the solidarity of working people knowing full well he will be vilified and pilloried in print (and probably behind his back) because he’s given most of his life to public service and not to the self serving hacks of the entertainment industry. So much for “Si, se puede.”
Lloyd, you may not be “…thrilled that (Thompson) sometimes … seems to use American politics [instead of Hollywood] as his unemployment office…” but it seems the reverse is probably more accurate. I’m not thrilled that you can’t go after the “L’il Rascals” in the Democratic party and leave the Elmer Fudds of the Republican party alone.
STEPHEN BREEN is a Santa Monica resident, self-proclaimed Reagan Republican and “the best looking mailman in the US Postal Service.” He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 29, 2008. Read the original PDF.