Ouch! That’s Gotta Hurt

It’s not bad enough, as I mentioned days ago, that actor-politician Fred Thompson was a “mole” for the Nixon White House during the Watergate investigation. The GOP presidential-wannabe might have gotten over that revelation in the media; after all, his complicity with the disgraced ex-president isn’t likely to hurt Thompson’s standing much with his Republican’t backers. But now comes word that, not only did Richard M. Nixon used the then-30-year-old Tennessean, who served as an investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate committee, as a vital source of information about the Senate proceedings, but he thought Thompson was “dumb as hell.”

These revelations, reports the Associated Press, come from audio tapes of White House conversations reviewed by the AP and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. On those tapes, Nixon’s lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, assures his boss that “We’ve got a pretty good rapport with Fred Thompson.” But Nixon expressed concern that Thompson was not “very smart.”

“Not extremely so,” Buzhardt agreed. “But he’s friendly,” Nixon said. “But he’s friendly,” Buzhardt repeated. Days later, Buzhardt assured Nixon that “Thompson [is] most cooperative, feeling more Republican every day ... willing to go, you know, pretty much the distance now. And he said he realized his responsibility was going to have be as a Republican increasingly.”

So, not only is the man many Republican’ts believe to be their best (if not only) hope in the 2008 presidential race “dumb as hell,” to quote Tricky Dick, but he’s a willing co-conspirator in trying to subvert the Constitution in the cause of partisan politics. Sounds like the perfect GOP candidate.