Posted on 06/20/2007 10:25:02 AM PDT by de meanr
Spontaneously combust?
>Spontaneously combust?<
:) No wishful thinking now.
Thompson is a lot like Bush—similar accent, thin to non-existent record of accomplishment in government, good ol’ boy charm, not much substance, and no proven record of ability as a manager. One major difference though—Bush went from frat boy to grownup. Fred has done the reverse—gone from grownup to frat boy. He quit as a Senator, dumped his wife of seventeen years, went Hollywood and chased starlets, and married a trophy wife who looks to be half his age and whose main asset appears to be her willingess to expose an enormous cleavage.
The Democrats are already laughing about how they’re going to point to what one commentator referred to as Thompson’s “anonymous” Senate career. Was Reagan an “anonymous” governor of California? Have Tancredo or Hunter been anonymous representatives? Is Hillary an “anonymous” senator.
A Southern accent, a pickup truck, and no real record of accomplishment aren’t going to be good enough. We’ve seen what becomes of that.
FredHeads are deadheads.
..Extreme, you have to understand California politics
If Mt. Shasta blows up and half of CA falls into the Pacific Ocean--then a conservative has a chance at winning high office out here.
Don't forget, our Republican Governor is actually a Kennedy with muscles...
Thompson is pure Southerner, while Bush is a Northeastern transplant.
thin to non-existent record of accomplishment in government
Served on Watergate committee, brought down a corrupt TN Governor, shepherded Bush's judicial picks through the Senate, 8 years solid conservative Senate record.
and no proven record of ability as a manager.
Irrelevant, he has leadership & has a command of the issues.
One major difference though—Bush went from frat boy to grownup. Fred has done the reverse—gone from grownup to frat boy.
Pure rubbish.
He quit as a Senator
His daughter died tragically
dumped his wife of seventeen years
Mutual divorce
went Hollywood and chased starlets
Hollywood came to him; 2nd lame-ass talking point: he was single, so what. Are you jealous that a 50+ man was banging beautiful women? ROFL
and married a trophy wife who looks to be half his age and whose main asset appears to be her willingess to expose an enormous cleavage.
OMG! The horror! Maybe he should have been gay, right?
Should you trust a candidate who uses his Jedi power to gain support?
Yeah, that's working out very well. He's paving the way for Governor Villagrosia. BTW Schwarzenkennedy doesn't have muscles anymore, per recent pics.
Even if Hunter ran and lost, his profile would have been icnreased to the point where he could have been the front-runner today.
Fred was a young father and took responsibility and married the mother. He put himself through law school. After his accomplishments, he let his hair down a little. Big whoop. That's a far cry from being in a stupor as Bush did before he "grew up" at age 40.
..you mean like Dan Lundgren--come on, getting creamed in an election doesn't put him in any position except a loser...
I am sure he would if we ever have any “real” debates. As for the media circuses that are mascarading as debates, he is wise to skip these charades.
“Thompson thinks he’s above the fray.”
It is not a question of thinking he is above the fray, but a matter of a potential candidate who FINALLY has the guts and brains not to let the media establishment run his campaign for him. This is shaping up to be a textbook campaign in which a conservative is able to bypass the MSM and take his message directly to the people. Such savvy will serve him well in using the Presidential bully pulpit should he get elected. He seems to be the only candidate of either party who fully understands that the information age is reshaping how Americans get their information. I find that aspect of his campaign fascinating
Bypassing the MSM? Fred has been enjoying soft freebies on TV on nearly a daily basis for months now. How is that bypassing the MSM? The MSM has been showcasing him bigtime.
Lungren lost because he ran to the middle.
Hunter would have probably won in CA, IMO.
Actually, most of his early support comes from those who want to see the GOP turn away from its current path of big government conservatism and re-embrace the Goldwater/Reagan brand of limited government conservatism. The fact that he has strong communication skills is also a big plus. This early, people who only know him from the movies and TV are not even paying attention to politics. In fact, most of these people probably do not recognize him by his real name. It is grass roots conservative activists who have built up his support. That support has nothing to do with his acting career. I, for one, have never even seen Law and Order.
,br>
“By playing I mean being a bona fide candidate with the rest of them, and not unfairly accepting constant tv freebies.”
Just because no other candidate has either figured out how to buck the MSM and not let them run his campaign, does not mean Fred should join them in marching like Lemmings off a cliff. His “campaign” is a text book example of how a conservative can bypass the MSM and take his message directly to the people. Instead of whining about it, conservatives should be taking notes for future elections and for how to use the Presidential bully pulpit once elected.
Only in a superficial stylistic way. When it comes to ideological substance, they are at opposites ends of the pole. Bush is a big government conservative and Thompson is a small government federalist. That is the difference which counts and is why I opposed Bush in the 2000 GOP Primaries, but support Thompson.
He is bypassing the MSM in the sense that he is not letting them dictate how he delivers his message. (Skipping those stupid “debates”, while getting a chance to comment largely uninterrupted on them) Sure he has been getting coverage, but it has been on his terms. I want someone with that kind of media savvy to have access to the Presidential bully pulpit so he can communicate the conservative vision to the American people.
He runs, I’ll support. My primary candidate would be Duncan Hunter, but I think that Fred might be much more electable. Time will tell, and I’m withholding funds for the time being.
That’s typical globalist thinking. It is meddling in what is none of our business.
No, that is smart strategic thinking. We do not need to intervene militarily to support freedom. During the Cold War we used media such as radio to broadcast the message of freedom behind the iron curtain. Another tactic that Reagan used was supporting freedom fighters who were engaged in the struggle against Soviet Tyranny. The pro-freedom offensive was a MAJOR reason why we won the cold war when we did. Thompson understands this well and wants to do the same thing with Information Technology in the war on Islamo-Fascism. According to some of their leaders, they fear this potential greatly:
AL QAEDA’S AGENDA FOR IRAQ
by Amir Taheri
NEW YORK POST
September 4, 2003
‘IT is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, in fact its very survival, is American democracy.” This is the message of a new book, just published by al Qaeda in several Arab countries.
The author of “The Future of Iraq and The Arabian Peninsula After The Fall of Baghdad” is Yussuf al-Ayyeri, one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates since the early ‘90s. A Saudi citizen also known by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad, he was killed in a gun battle with security forces in Riyadh last June.
The book is published by The Centre for Islamic Research and Studies, a company set up by bin Laden in 1995 with branches in New York and London (now closed). Over the past eight years, it has published more than 40 books by al Qaeda “thinkers and researchers” including militants such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s No. 2.
Al-Ayyeri first made his name in the mid ‘90s as a commander of the Farouq camp in eastern Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and the Taliban trained thousands of “volunteers for martyrdom.”
Al-Ayyeri argues that the history of mankind is the story of “perpetual war between belief and unbelief.” Over the millennia, both have appeared in different guises. As far as belief is concerned, the absolutely final version is represented by Islam, which “annuls all other religions and creeds.” Thus, Muslims can have only one goal: converting all humanity to Islam and “effacing the final traces of all other religions, creeds and ideologies.”
Unbelief (kufr) has come in numerous forms and shapes, but with a single objective: to destroy faith in God. In the West, unbelief has succeeded in making a majority of people forget God and worship the world. Islam, however, is resisting the trend because Allah means to give it final victory.
Al-Ayyeri then shows how various forms of unbelief attacked the world of Islam in the past century or so, to be defeated in one way or another.
The first form of unbelief to attack was “modernism” (hidatha), which led to the caliphate’s destruction and the emergence in the lands of Islam of states based on ethnic identities and territorial dimensions rather than religious faith.
The second was nationalism, which, imported from Europe, divided Muslims into Arabs, Persians, Turks and others. Al-Ayyeri claims that nationalism has now been crushed in almost all Muslim lands. He claims that a true Muslim is not loyal to any particular nation-state.
The third form of unbelief is socialism, which includes communism. That, too, has been defeated and eliminated from the Muslim world, Al-Ayyeri asserts. He presents Ba’athism, the Iraqi ruling party’s ideology under Saddam Hussein, as the fourth form of unbelief to afflict Muslims, especially Arabs. Ba’athism (also the official ideology of the Syrian regime) offers Arabs a mixture of pan-Arabism and socialism as an alternative to Islam. Al-Ayyeri says Muslims “should welcome the destruction of Ba’athism in Iraq.”
“The end of Ba’ath rule in Iraq is good for Islam and Muslims,” he writes. “Where the banner of Ba’ath has fallen, shall rise the banner of Islam.”
The author notes as “a paradox” the fact that all the various forms of unbelief that threatened Islam were defeated with the help of the Western powers, and more specifically the United States.
The “modernizing” movement in the Muslim world was ultimately discredited when European imperial powers forced their domination on Muslim lands, turning the Westernized elite into their “hired lackeys.” The nationalists were defeated and discredited in wars led against them by various Western powers or, in the case of Nasserism in Egypt, by Israel.
The West also gave a hand in defeating socialism and communism in the Muslim world. The most dramatic example of this came when America helped the Afghan mujaheeden destroy the Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul. And now the United States and its British allies have destroyed Ba’athism in Iraq and may have fatally undermined it in Syria as well.
What Al-Ayyeri sees now is a “clean battlefield” in which Islam faces a new form of unbelief. This, he labels “secularist democracy.” This threat is “far more dangerous to Islam” than all its predecessors combined. The reasons, he explains in a whole chapter, must be sought in democracy’s “seductive capacities.”
This form of “unbelief” persuades the people that they are in charge of their destiny and that, using their collective reasoning, they can shape policies and pass laws as they see fit. That leads them into ignoring the “unalterable laws” promulgated by God for the whole of mankind, and codified in the Islamic shariah (jurisprudence) until the end of time.
The goal of democracy, according to Al-Ayyeri, is to “make Muslims love this world, forget the next world and abandon jihad.” If established in any Muslim country for a reasonably long time, democracy could lead to economic prosperity, which, in turn, would make Muslims “reluctant to die in martyrdom” in defense of their faith.
He says that it is vital to prevent any normalization and stabilization in Iraq. Muslim militants should make sure that the United States does not succeed in holding elections in Iraq and creating a democratic government. “If democracy comes to Iraq, the next target [for democratization] would be the whole of the Muslim world,” Al-Ayyeri writes.
The al Qaeda ideologist claims that the only Muslim country already affected by “the beginning of democratization” and thus in “mortal danger” is Turkey.
“Do we want what happened in Turkey to happen to all Muslim countries?” he asks. “Do we want Muslims to refuse taking part in jihad and submit to secularism, which is a Zionist-Crusader concoction?”
Al-Ayyeri says Iraq would become the graveyard of secular democracy, just as Afghanistan became the graveyard of communism. The idea is that the Americans, faced with mounting casualties in Iraq, will “just run away,” as did the Soviets in Afghanistan. This is because the Americans love this world and are concerned about nothing but their own comfort, while Muslims dream of the pleasures that martyrdom offers in paradise.
“In Iraq today, there are only two sides,” Al-Ayyeri asserts. “Here we have a clash of two visions of the world and the future of mankind. The side prepared to accept more sacrifices will win.”
Al-Ayyeri’s analysis may sound naive; he also gets most of his facts wrong. But he is right in reminding the world that what happens in Iraq could affect other Arab countries - in fact, the whole of the Muslim world.
E-mail: amirtaheri@benadorassociates.com
The force is strong with this one.....
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