Old dog for the hard road

Blue Skirt (Red Skirt also here) thinks Republicans have gone Hollywood. Not much. Granted, former Sen. Fred Thompson is currently a star of TV's "Law and Order" but please---he's no pretty face and doesn't have much hair. He's a man of character on and off the set. Even his acting career was a byproduct of his pursuit of the public interest. John Fund:

Later in the 1970s he played a key role in exposing a Tennessee cash-for-pardons scandal; his acting career began when he won the part of playing himself in the 1985 movie version of the story.

For the record, I've never watched "Law and Order", or any of his movies, and I consider him a candidate of seasoned presidential timber. He has a long record of public service, starting as a young lawyer with the Watergate investigation.

As Republican counsel in the Watergate hearings, he began building a reputation as a straight-shooter. It was he who asked the question that forced a White House deputy to admit that Richard Nixon had secretly recorded his Oval Office conversations.

Blue Skirt neglects to mention one of the reasons Sen. Thompson left the Senate in 2002 was the death of his adult daughter. The other reason was his increasing frustration with the continuous jockeying over minutiae of the Senate.

And his gravitas contrasts well with the leading candidates of the other party who hail from the Senate---one a lawyer who piggybacked on her husband's political rise, representing clients in front of her husband's state regulators, the subject herself of more than one serious investigation, (recall the Clintons fired all but one of the 90 plus US attorneys) whose major initiative under his presidency (thankfully) ended in catastrophic failure, and who was then elected to the Senate in an overwhelmingly Democrat state (Hillary Clinton); the other who, barely out of school, served as an extremely liberal state legislator in a party dominated by machine hacks, supporting and supported by them in his rise to the Senate representing one of the most corrupt states in the country (Barack Obama). The rest of the Democrat slate is mostly peopled by more vain Senate blowhards. Thompson had the sense to get out. The Senate is not a governing body, after all, much as they like to think they are.

Fred Thompson is a self-made man. The son of a used-car salesman, grandson of a sharecropper, the Senator rose on his own merits and hard work. Unlike Hillary's listening tour evasions, and Obama's high-flown banalities, Thompson always expresses himself in a deliberate and substantive manner. In his first major interview stating his serious consideration to run he was straightforward on the issues. Lately he took on the pirates of Tehran. Now he squarely gives us the facts on his cancer, in remission.

And he may have played a president, but he doesn't seem to have the need to compare himself to an earlier great one or two, nor does he trot out as needed the option of a buy one get one free presidency.

As for the other Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor, I applaud his efforts to restore the role of the family and roll back the pathological liberal social engineering of the welfare state, which was signed, I would remind Blue Skirt, by Bill Clinton. (He's been out of the public arena for a few years though, and his signature issue is no longer in play, which is why his candidacy for president has no traction.)

The family is not a social engineering construct, and conservatism is best served by supporting individual and familial efforts rather than the intrusive government favored by liberal nanny-staters. George Bush and his dad may have felt the need for the adjectives kinder, gentler and compassionate, but most of us conservatives are comfortable with the basic, tried and true model.

Kind of like Fred Thompson's old, red truck. (As my 80 year old Dad says, "the old dog for the hard road".) Thompson from Tennessee will travel well in the US of A.