Beautiful. The nutball meme spreads.
Now from MSNBC: Terrorism one of the “unintended consequences of universal healthcare.”
First heard on Fox yesterday.
Late Update: It’s one of the features of our age that there’s a very fine line separating ideas that are too silly to even take note of and ones that quickly began to have a real effect on the public policy debate. Here we have one that clearly should be in the former category but is more likely in the latter. So if you see this line of reasoning popping up on the web or on tv, please let us know.
Poll finds 45% of adults support initiating impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush, 54% support pursuing impeachment of Cheney.
Triple mega ouch. Ron Paul has more money on hand than McCain.
New Iran regime-change think tank hits the scene in D.C.
The meme spreads! New York Sun picks up on the universal healthcare/terrorism link.
Alabama congressman raises new questions about Siegelman prosecution.
Bye, Fred …
(From the LAT … )
Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican, accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and several people familiar with the matter.
A spokesman for the former Tennessee senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But the minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. say that the group hired Thompson that year.
His task was to urge the administration of President George H. W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money, according to the records and to people who worked on the matter.
Eleanor Clift points to the ‘tell’ that still hasn’t gotten enough attention …
Fitzgerald said he wasnât able to uncover the conspiracy because of all the sand thrown in his eyes by Libby to obstruct the investigation. Looking back at the trial, it was as inevitable as night following day that President Bush would find a way to get Libby off the hook. The fix was in when Libbyâs high-priced legal team mounted a curiously passive defense. After pointing to Vice President Cheney as an instigator in the Plame naming, hinting they might even call the veep to testify, they abruptly backed off, slow-walking Libby toward conviction with no alibi for his lies other than that he didnât remember. As legal eagles, they didnât impress, but they did preserve the pardon option.
There was a promise: you’ll never do a day in jail.
And metaphorically at least, as the trial got underway, he got it in writing.
Following up on Josh’s item about Fred Thompson lobbying for pro-choice policies on behalf of a family-planning group, the story represents a double threat to the nascent presidential hopeful.
First, this is a major new challenge for Thompson, who has struggled a bit to prove his anti-abortion bona fides, to prove to the far-right GOP base that he’s sufficiently right-wing.
Taking up the defense for Thompson, however, is John Hinderaker, who makes a passionate case that a lobbyist should not necessarily be judged by his or her clients. Lobbyists, like lawyers, may take on patrons with whom they disagree.
But the story here is not just that Thompson lobbied for a pro-choice cause, but that he’s vociferously denying it now.
Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo adamantly denied that Thompson worked for the family planning group. “Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period,” he said in an e-mail.
In a telephone interview, he added: “There’s no documents to prove it, there’s no billing records, and Thompson says he has no recollection of it, says it didn’t happen.” In a separate interview, John H. Sununu, the White House official whom the family planning group wanted to contact, said he had no memory of the lobbying and doubted it took place.
The response is … odd. The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. produced the minutes of a 1991 board meeting that say the group hired Thompson to lobby on the group’s behalf. Judith DeSarno, who was president of the family planning association at the time, said Thompson lobbied for the group for several months, and noted the multiple meetings and conversations she had with Thompson about his progress in lobbying for her cause. What’s more, the LA Times spoke to “three other people [who] recalled Thompson lobbying against the rule on behalf of the family planning association.”
Former Rep. Michael D. Barnes (D-Md.), Thompson’s former law-firm colleague, helped connect Thompson to the family-planning group in the first place, and said it was “absolutely bizarre” for Thompson to deny his lobbying work.
“I talked to him while he was doing it, and I talked to [DeSarno] about the fact that she was very pleased with the work that he was doing for her organization,” Barnes said. “I have strong, total recollection of that. This is not something I dreamed up or she dreamed up. This is fact.”
If Thompson wanted to make the Hinderaker-like argument that he took on a client with which he disagreed, he could try to make the case and hope the Dobson crowd bought it. But it’s far more peculiar for Thompson to simply deny the work outright.
Getting away with lobbying for a pro-choice client is an awkward hurdle. Getting caught lying about it can dog a presidential campaign for quite a while.
The hits just keep on coming.
The fourth example of the far-right Meme of the Week comes by way of the National Review’s Iain Murray:
The socialization of medicine in the UK is responsible for a lot of problems. The importation of terrorists is just one of them.
For those keeping score at home, Fox News was first, followed by MSNBC, and then the New York Sun.
Update: Reader J.S. points out that the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz started hinting at the connection on Tuesday morning.