Don't let them diminish Fred's Senate record!
posted by Sturm Ruger on Sat 23 of Jun, 2007 [12:02 UTC]

With a formal announcement to enter the 2008 presidential race now only days away, Fred Thompson's political opposition has shifted into full attack mode. They're lashing out at Fred on every front, and from the outlying points of both sides of the political spectrum.

The Tin Foil Hat Brigade on the right has latched onto Fred's Council on Foreign Relations membership to try to paint him as a "neocon globalist" all too ready to give away the country's soverignty. Not even a morsel of truth in it, of course, and when I mention that a few of Fred's CFR colleagues are John Bolton, William F. Buckley and Gen. Alkexander Haig, they either change the subject quickly or just slink away, only to show up later pushing the same discredited line of attack.

The left seems to have settled on a tactic of attempting to diminish Thompson's service in the U.S. Senate, and the word they've cut and pasted from their talking points memo is "undistinguished." To me, this seems a suprising tact for the Democrats to take, especially given that collective accomplishments of the Senate careers of their three leading candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama and John Edwards can't even come close to measuring up to that of Fred Thompson. But hypocrisy never was something to stop, or even slow down, a liberal hell-bent on attacking an opponent. The media, as expected, and even the supporters of a few of Fred's GOP opponents, sadly, have joined the Democrats in making these attacks on the nature of Fred Thompson's Senate career.

Many on the left measure a legislator's performance by the number of bills he or she introduced. John Kerry, for example, authored a number of measures, but many of them carried no greater weight than to name buildings, roads and airports after some hero or another of the left. When it comes to legislation, conservatives see quality as much more important than quantity.

Fred did plenty as a U.S. Senator. Most of the bills he introduced in that body were aimed at increasing our national security against terrorism, providing tax relief to citizens and small businesses and cutting government red tape. Among them were the Nuclear Proliferation Act, Special Counsel Act, Aviation Security Bill Amendment, FY 1999 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, Regulatory Right-To-Know Act, Homeland Security Workforce Act, Homeland Security Education Act, Thompson amendment to Treasury-Postal Title (Section 646) of the Consolidated Appropriations Bill, Regulatory Improvement Act (S. 981), Thompson Amendment to the National Homeland Security and Combating Terrorism Act, Thompson Amendment to the National Employee Savings and Trust Equity Act, The Federal Emergency Procurement Flexibility Act, The Federalism Accountability Act, The Government Information Security Reform Act (GISRA), The Thompson Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, and The Truth in Regulation Act.