Day: May 31, 2007

Fred Thompson Worked as a Washington Lobbyist for 18 Years

Jon Ponder

There’s fresh word today that Fred Thompson will announce in July that he is getting in the GOP presidential race. Coincidentally, here’s a bullet point on his resume that was news to me:

Thompson’s successes as a lobbyist include pushing for deregulatory legislation that led to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s

Over about two decades of lobbying (during which he also acted and practiced law), Thompson made nearly $1.3 million and represented clients including a British reinsurance company facing billions of dollars in asbestos claims, Canadian-owned cable companies, and deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to government documents and media accounts from his first run for the Senate in 1994…’There’s nothing wrong with lobbying. It’s an honorable profession,’ Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo said…A year after stepping down [from the Senate in January 2003], he registered to lobby for British reinsurance company Equitas Ltd. The company paid him $760,000 to guard its interests against several bills seeking to protect businesses from asbestos lawsuits.

And:

Critics point out that Thompson’s aw-shucks, shit-kicker populism is more than a little bit phony. That he spent 18 years as a registered Washington lobbyist, doing the bidding of such high-powered clients as General Electric and Westinghouse, pushing for the passage of the deregulatory legislation that led to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s.

Conservatives have been hailing Fred as the living incarnation of St. Ronnie, but “Republican lobbyist” has become synonymous with “D.C. call girl,” thanks to Jack Abramoff and his merry band of pranksters and murderers.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Journalism in America is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be overrated. Politicians are frightened of the press, and in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalizing effect upon Spain (of which she is unconscious), headlines of murder, rape and rubbish excite and demoralize the American public.

— Margot Asquith

DeLay: My Adultery Was Less Immoral Than Newt’s

Jon Ponder

In his book, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” Tom DeLay, the indicted former House Majority Leader, admits that in the days when he was drinking as many as 10 martinis a day, he engaged in extramarital affairs:

“I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference.”
— Tom DeLay

In this period, he earned the nickname Hot Tub Tom. Then he found Jesus and, he said, stopped sinning. In the book, he freely confesses to committing adultery. “I had put my needs first,” he told me. “I was on the throne, not God. I had pushed God from His throne.”

In the book, DeLay attacked his former colleague, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for having an affair while he was leading the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton because he committed perjury when asked under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. DeLay says Gingrich’s adultery was worse than his — due to the implicit hypocrisy:

[Gingrich was] conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich’s third wife.) “Yes, I don’t think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment,” DeLay said. “You can’t do that if you’re keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs.”

A reasonable person might see this as splitting hairs, but so-called Christians always have an “out” when it comes to accountability:

“I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference … Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time.”

But what about “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” Tom?