Living in the same glass house...

After posting about John McCain's hypocracy in his comments about Rudy's Second Amendment stance, I happened to be reading a post over at SondraK's site which reminded me about Fred Thompson's support of McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform.

Fred Thompson's big huge zit

Fred Thompson finally made clear his position on the statist campaign finance restrictions embodied in the McCain-Feingold bill. And conservatives are clearly not going to be pleased.

When the former star of TV’s “Law and Order” series and newly-minted presidential candidate spoke to reporters on the porch of the Grand Hotel here, I asked Thompson whether he was proud of his role in enacting the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation in ‘01.

“Yes," replied the former Tennessee senator without hesitation.

To be honest, I completely forgot about his involvement in getting that legislation passed through the Senate. In researching this flub on Thompson's part, I found a post over at Michelle Malkin's site, HotAir.com, that has an interview between Fred Thompson and Laura Ingraham, where Laura grills Fred over his support of the McCain-Feingold bill.



Link: sevenload.com


As for the rest of the article from Human Events, Thompson goes on to admit that the reform bill did not produce the results he expected and states that he intends to revisit the details of that piece of legislation which many conservatives agree was one of the worst infringements on America's right to freedom of speech in recent history.

..."You will recall that the central part of the legislation was getting rid of soft money [from the political process]." He then went on to remind me that he came from a background in the private sector and, in that sector, it would have been thought unseemly for "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to be poured in to influence someone's decision. In the public arena, "it got to be the norm" because of the soft money, upon which there were no limits for donations to the two major political parties." The contributors, he said, would then, "harass legislators before they vote on anything. This was not a good idea."
Continued


Thompson went on to remind me that it was his amendment to McCain-Feingold that, "raised the hard money index" and he was also proud of that.

If there is anything in McCain-Feingold that "has not worked out," he went to say, it is "placing limitations on ads [by independent groups] in the [political] process. Thompson hinted that he would support legislation to change this, since "the Supreme Court has better things to do with its time than hear cases on unfair limitation." (Earlier this year, by a decision of 5-to-4, the Supreme Court struck down parts of McCain-Feingold that dealt with limiting ads by independent groups.) He also said that the landmark campaign finance legislation he held shepherd to passage (and which President Bush signed in '01) has created a larger bureaucracy to enforce regulations and "that part hasn't worked out."

*snip*

I do hope that he is sincere about fixing that ridiculous law and hopefully he will avoid throwing stones in glass houses or slipping in any hypocritical piles of dog shit as well. That being said, IMO, Fred would still make a damned good and strong leader.