Fred Thompson announces candidacy for president

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/06/thompson/?iref=mpstoryview

Fred Thompson announces candidacy for president

Story Highlights
Thompson tells Jay Leno he's running for president
Official announcement comes in a webcast posted early Thursday
Republican candidate dismisses suggestions he may be late entering the race
Thompson is an actor and a former senator

(CNN) -- After months of not-so-coy will-he-or-won't-he political flirtation, Fred Thompson has finally and officially announced that he is a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

"I am running for president of the United States," he said during a taping of NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" Wednesday evening, drawing applause and cheers from the audience.

It's the same venue that helped launch the electoral career of another celebrity-turned-politician, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Thompson also talked about his decision to join the race in a webcast that went online early Thursday.

"I'm going to give this campaign all that I have to give, and I hope that you'll join me," Thompson said in the video announcement posted on his campaign Web site. "Our country needs us to win next year, and I'm ready to lead that effort."

Thompson, 65, who has had a multifaceted career as a prosecutor, lobbyist, actor and U.S. senator from Tennessee, is angling for a conservative base that has yet to coalesce around a favorite.

His decision to run was widely expected, after he formed an exploratory committee in June to begin raising money.

But political observers say Thompson may be late by entering the race months after his GOP rivals.

The first voting is only four months away and the other candidates have been in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond for months.

But Thompson dismissed suggestions that he took too long to make the decision.

"I don't think people are going to say, 'You know, that guy would make a very good president, but he just didn't get in soon enough,"' Thompson told Leno. "If you can't get your message out in a few months, you're probably not ever going to get it out." Watch Thompson tell Leno that he's running »

Thompson's Republican rivals poked fun at his absence from a debate in New Hampshire on Thursday night shortly before his announcement.

Arizona Sen. John McCain said, "I think that's a decision that Fred should make and maybe we're up past his bed time."

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said, "I was scheduled to be on Jay Leno tonight, but I gave up my spot to somebody else because I'd rather be in New Hampshire with these fine people."

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney poked fun at Thompson's delayed entry into the presidential race.

"[The] only question I have: Why the hurry, why not take some more time off?" "Maybe January or Febuary might be a better time to make a decision about getting into this race."

In his video announcement, Thompson touted his support for what he termed common-sense conservative principles, including low taxes, free markets, balanced budgets and the "sanctity of life."

"These principles made our country great, and we should re-dedicate ourselves to them, not abandon them," he said.

On the Iraq war, Thompson also challenged Democrats pushing for a withdrawal of U.S. forces, embracing President Bush's view that the U.S. effort in Iraq is a central front in the war on terror.

"Our courage as a people must match that of the brave men and women in uniform fighting for us," he said. "They know if we abandon our efforts, or appear weak and divided, we'll pay a heavy price for it in the future."

Even before he became a candidate, Thompson showed well in recent national poll averages, trailing only the front-runner, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

His acting role on NBC's popular "Law and Order" TV shows has buoyed his name recognition and prompted comparisons to another actor-turned-president beloved by conservatives, Ronald Reagan.

Thursday morning, Thompson will begin a two-day tour across Iowa, whose precinct caucuses traditionally kick off the nominating season in January. See Thompson's new presidential campaign buses

He will travel from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, Sioux City, Mason City, Cedar Rapids and Davenport on a brown, yellow and red bus festooned with the slogan "United By Our Core Beliefs."

After his Iowa tour, Thompson will take his campaign to three other states with early primary contests -- New Hampshire, Florida and South Carolina.

"Expectations are sky high, which means he'd better perform flawlessly out of the box or a lot of people are going to start grumbling that he's not the great savior we thought he was," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres.

Thompson's virtual campaign kickoff came just hours after his GOP rivals held their latest campaign debate Wednesday night in New Hampshire -- an event he skipped to unveil his political plans on the set of "The Tonight Show."

Thompson joked that while he meant no disrespect to the organizers of Wednesday's Granite State event, "It's a lot more difficult to get on 'The Tonight Show' than it is to get into a presidential debate."

Over the summer, Thompson's nascent non-campaign campaign ran into turbulence with the departure of several staffers, including veteran Republican campaign adviser Tom Collamore, who left after disagreements with the candidate's wife, Jeri, over organization and staffing decisions, according to Republican sources familiar with Collamore's decision.

Jeri Thompson, 40, was a GOP media consultant before marrying Thompson in 2002.

The political world was also roundly unimpressed with the $3.4 million Thompson's exploratory committee raised during its first month of operation in June -- a fundraising pace far weaker than his GOP competitors.

Despite those bumps and his late start, Thompson has said he believes his campaign is still well-positioned to win the nomination.

Thompson's government service goes back to 1969, when he became a federal prosecutor in Nashville.

His profile went national in 1973, when he was appointed as the Republican counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee investigating misdeeds by President Richard Nixon and members of his staff.

During televised hearings that riveted the nation, it was Thompson who famously and dramatically asked White House aide Alexander Butterfield about the existence of tapes made of Oval Office conversations, which would eventually turn out to be Nixon's undoing.

After Watergate, Thompson returned to Tennessee to practice law. He fell into a career as an actor when he was asked to play himself in the 1985 movie "Marie," which was based on a real-life case in which he represented a whistleblower who exposed corruption. His performance in the film led to other film and TV roles.

In 1994, Thompson sought political office for the first time, running for the remaining two years of the Senate term that Democrat Al Gore gave up when he was elected vice president in 1992.

After barnstorming the Volunteer State in a red pickup truck while wearing cowboy boots, Thompson won in a landslide, and, in 1996, easily won re-election to a full six-year term.

In 2002, however, Thompson decided not to seek re-election and left the Senate. He worked as a lawyer-lobbyist in Washington and also took on the role of the gruff, conservative New York District Attorney Arthur Branch on "Law and Order."

Thompson left the show earlier this year when he began considering a presidential bid.

In April, Thompson disclosed that in 2004, he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. However, he said the cancer was in remission and he was suffering no symptoms.

CNN's John King, Bethany Swain and Doug Schantz contributed to this report.

John Yoo -- then and now

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/24/yoo/

Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday July 24, 2007
John Yoo -- then and now

The Wall St. Journal Editorial Page wanted someone to defend George Bush's serial assertions of "Executive Privilege" to block investigations into his wrongdoing, and it turned, of course, to ex-Bush-DOJ-lawyer John Yoo, who is not only the most authoritarian but also the most partisan and intellectually dishonest lawyer in the country. Yoo is not only willing -- but intensely eager -- to defend literally anything George W. Bush does or would want to do, including -- literally -- torturing people and crushing the testicles of children if the Leader decreed that doing so was necessary to fight Terrorists. Yoo, of course, is a principal author of most of the radical executive power theories which have eroded our constitutional framework over the last six years.

In defending the President, Yoo's Op-Ed yesterday touts the grave importance of Executive Privilege and makes all the claims one would expect. He stresses the "president's right to keep internal executive discussions confidential"; proclaims that "without secrecy, the government can't function"; compares Bush's assertions to George Washington's; and concludes that by asserting Executive Privilege (nowhere mentioned in the Constitution), Bush "has the Constitution on his side."

But this isn't the first Op-Ed Yoo has written on the topic of Executive Privilege for the Wall St. Journal. Back in 1998, when Bill Clinton was asserting the same privilege to resist Congressional demands that his closest aides testify about the President's deliberations in responding to the various Lewinsky investigations, Yoo became one of the leading spokespeople denouncing the assertion of this privilege.

On March 2, 1998, Yoo wrote an Op-Ed (sub. req'd) for the WSJ Editorial Page (which back then also opposed the privilege only now to depict it as the anchor of a Free Government). In denouncing Clinton's executive privilege assertions, Yoo began his op-ed this way:

James Madison wrote that a "popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both."

That is the same Yoo who, under the Bush presidency, has become a virtually absolute defender of presidential secrecy. Yoo continued:

Reports that President Clinton may invoke executive privilege to block the investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair have elements of both. . . .

Mindful of the extraordinary step of keeping information secret in a democratic government, presidents since Nixon have been wary of resorting to executive privilege. Presidents Ford, Carter and Bush formally raised the privilege only once each, and President Reagan three times in two full terms. In less than 1 1/2 terms, Mr. Clinton has claimed executive privilege at least six times, four times before Congress and twice in court. Like the boy crying wolf, Mr. Clinton's regular use of the privilege threatens to dilute its effectiveness for future presidents on matters of true national importance . . . .

A decision to invoke executive privilege in this case would be yet another example of the Clinton administration's failure to understand the distinction between the office of the president and the person who happens to be the president. In democracies, we distinguish between a public office and the person who holds that office; people for whom the office and the person are one and the same are called kings.

That is from the individual who, from his perch at the Bush DOJ, has done as much as any other single individual to wage war on our constitutional order and drag this country as close to monarchical rule as it has been at any other point in its history. And while Yoo defends Bush's newly announced position that he has the power to block U.S. attorneys from prosecuting his subordinates, Yoo complained in 1998 that "Clinton is effectively the first President to formally assert a complete freedom from the criminal justice system solely because he is President."

Ironically, in his WSJ Op-Ed yesterday, Yoo -- while attempting to distinguish Clinton's allegedly invalid assertions from Bush's (naturally) valid ones -- accuses those who defended Clinton back then but oppose Bush now of "blowing partisan smoke." Yet Yoo never once mentions his own complete reversal in positions.

This is not the first time that Yoo has spouted fundamentally different "legal" views based on his political agenda. As Anonymous Liberal first noted last year, Yoo -- in 2003, before it was known that Bush was eavesdropping outside of FISA -- wrote an Op-Ed praising FISA as a constitutional and important safeguard which gave the President the eavesdropping tools he needed to fight the Terrorists while at the same time protecting our privacy.

But once it was revealed in 2005 that the President was violating FISA, Yoo suddenly reversed course, claiming that FISA was an unconstitutional infringement on the President's power and that Bush's violations of it were necessary to protect us all from being vaporized at the hands of the Terrorists. That behavior is quite similar to the right-wing fanatics who spent the 1990s vocally objecting to the "secret FISA court," whereby Bill Clinton could eavesdrop on us by getting warrants from a secret court (!), only to then defend George Bush's eavesdropping on us with no warrants or judicial oversight of any kind.

Like every good authoritarian, Yoo's only real principle, his only True Conviction, is that the Leader is Good and Right. Everything else he says is but a tool used to achieve that end, and as is true for all authoritarians -- indeed, it is one of their defining mental attributes -- there is no bar against holding fundamentally opposite views simultaneously as long as each is used to strengthen the cause and defend the Leader. John Yoo is the embodiment of the authoritarian mind.

UPDATE: Several months after he boldly spoke out against Executive Privilege during the Lewinsky investigation, John Yoo returned to the Wall St. Journal Op-Ed page, on July 20, 1998, to argue that impeachment of Bill Clinton for defying a Subpoena issued by Ken Starr -- something which had just been advocated by Orrin Hatch -- "would stand on firm constitutional footing."

Yoo specifically (and solemnly) warned that if Clinton decided to defy Starr's Subpoena, Clinton "would be going beyond even Richard Nixon in abusing the presidency." Yoo then praised Nixon because, unlike Clinton, Nixon "chose not to press claims of presidential power to such extremes." Because if there is one thing which the principled, constitutional "scholar" John Yoo cannot abide, it is pressing claims of presidential power to the extreme.

Teddy Roosevelt on Presidential Criticism

Quote of the Week

http://www.concernedpeople.org/criticism.php

Teddy Roosevelt on Presidential Criticism

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."

-- Teddy Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918