In her recent syndicated column, Marianne Means turned her jaundiced left-liberal attentions to potential GOP Presidential hopeful Fred Thompson, in the process, penning the quintessential “progressive” political opinion column—one filled with condescension, veiled and not-so-veiled cheap shots, falsehoods presented as established truth, and character attacks attributed to unnamed third-party sources.

In short, it was precisely the kind of column that progressives like to write—one that leaves uninformed readers with misinformed, but with the smug suggestion (a product of both tone and choice of revealed detail) that, having now been informed, their acceptance of someone like Thompson would almost certainly exclude them from finer company.

Let’s have a look, shall we?

In politics, “new” is usually good and “familiar” is usually boring.

—Except, evidently, when such a cliche is used to begin what will prove to be a rather predictable column.  But then, perhaps self-awareness is not one of Ms Means’ strong suits.

But please, don’t mind me.  Continue!

So the actor and former Republican senator from Tennessee, Fred Thompson, is creating much political buzz with his late almost-entry into the 2008 presidential sweepstakes. Barely lifting a finger, he parachuted smack into the top tier of the 10-candidate field, running third in some polls and actually tying with the front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, in one.

If you are a traditional Republican, what’s not to like here? During his eight years in the Senate, Thompson was certifiably conservative, but never a scary ideologue. The National Journal ranked him as the 21st most conservative Republican, putting him toward the rightish center of his party.

Thompson does not plan to officially enter the race until next month, although he already has a campaign Web site, a batch of veteran political staffers and a busy fundraising operation. He has resigned from his famous, longstanding role as the gruff, savvy district attorney on “Law and Order”—and good thing, too, considering the conflict of interest it presented.

That conflict of interest being that an actor playing the part of a DA could unfairly confuse the American people, who are far too daft to separate a TV character from the person playing him.

Luckily, though, Ms Means is around to watch out for us—though in this case, Thompson did the “right” thing, and so gains a bit of grudging respect from Means.

Of course, that respect is premised on Ms Means’ surprise that a (potential) GOP candidate could actually see that being an employed actor on a TV law drama and running for President is a conflict of interest—progressives are all about perception, you see, and it evidently hasn’t occurred to Ms Means that the actual conflict could be one of time—and Republicans, in Ms Means experience, are not prone to doing the right thing.

Speaking of which:

In real life, Thompson has not been a champion of enforcing the law when it came to Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice and lying under oath. Thompson unequivocally endorses a pardon for Libby, who was part of a White House cover-up of efforts to discredit an Iraq war critic by exposing his wife as a covert CIA employee.

Well, I wouldn’t presume to speak for Thompson, but I’d bet that his explanation for his stance on a pardon for Libby is a bit more nuanced than “I’m not a champion of enforcing the law,” something along the lines of being outraged that an investigation into the leak was settled before any charges were brought against Libby—and so there was no reason to put Libby into a position where a jury could decide whether or not he’d committed perjury or simply misremembered.  Once perjury was decided upon—once, that is, they took Tim Russert’s word over Libby’s—obstruction necessarily followed. 

Of course, in real life, its quite possible to argue that Ms Means has not been a champion of reporting the truth, particularly here, when it comes to characterizing the nature of the Libby trial and its outcome.  First, it was the White House that agreed to appoint the special presecutor; it was the State Department—not the White House—from which the “leak” emerged; the “leak” was, by many accounts, no leak at all, as Plame’s employment was well known, and her “cover” had been blown back in 1997—and in fact, Joseph Wilson himself, who published a raft of outright lies in the NYT in order to try to swing a presidential election and secure his celebrity in leftwing circles—had been quite chatty about his wife’s CIA employment; it was Wilson who lied about his findings after being sent on his diplomatic fact-finding mission, the fruits of which are misreported in his Times op-ed; it was Plame herself who has lied about her responsibility in sending her husband; and, of course, there have never been charges brought against anyone for “outing” Ms Plame—though in his sentencing report, Fitzgerald, taking advantage of an unfortunate loophole in sentencing laws, disingenuously labeled Ms Plame “covert,” using not the applicable definition for the IIPA (under which someone could be charged, were she truly covert; see Toensing), but instead the CIA’s own definition, which is nowhere near as stringent as the one Armitage—not Libby—would have run afoul.

Fitzgerald and the CIA played a semantic game and threw red-meat to the haters of the administration—for Fitzgeral’s part, to excuse the fact that he wound up, after a long investigation, with a perjury and obstruction conviction unrelated to the actual leak (the origins of which he’d already determined) from a jury predisposed to find some grand conspiracy.  For its part, the CIA has to know that the left will seize upon any such appearance of impropriety and pretend, en masse, to believe it.

Which, let’s face it, is quite a bit different from the casually-dropped, “Thompson has not been a champion of enforcing the law when it came to Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice and lying under oath. Thompson unequivocally endorses a pardon for Libby, who was part of a White House cover-up of efforts to discredit an Iraq war critic by exposing his wife as a covert CIA employee.

— All of which, I think, Thompson recognizes, and so favors the pardon of a public servant who got caught up in one the left’s neverending ethics witch hunts (which remarkably, never seem to lead to the doorsteps of, say, Harry Reid or Al Gore or Dianne Feinstein).  But maybe Means is saving her outrage on those accounts for later columns…

Thompson benefits from a restlessness in the GOP, a yearning for the excitement conservative party stalwarts do not feel from the current field.

But Thompson’s main attraction—and potential problem—is that he is basically a political unknown, apart from his “Law and Order” fame. His personality is distinct, with a Southern down-home drawl that is big in the Old Confederacy but off-putting in cities elsewhere.

—As Jimmy Carter learned when he was soundly defeated in 1976.  And of course, Clinton?  Spoke like he had just walked off the plains of Nebraska.

But bracket that.  At least means was able to insinuate that Thompson is appealing to former slave owners—though I suspect most of them are now long dead.  Except in the Middle East and Africa.  But that’s only because Nancy Pelosi has yet to don a hijab and go give them a good talking to. 

He is an actor, and because Ronald Reagan proved that an actor can handle that biggest public role of all, ability to act has become a regular qualification for the presidency.

And he is big. At 6 feet, 6 inches, he is a burly figure who towers over most people, men as well as women. That visual impact imparts stature, whether deserved or not. Ask past presidential candidates if height matters. They know it can, such as in debates.

Jimmy Carter was so much shorter than Ronald Reagan that he insisted the cameras filming their 1980 debate be located at a distance. That way the height comparison would not be obvious.

But Reagan was too clever for Carter. At the end of the debate, he unhooked his microphone and walked over to Carter, still rooted to the stage with his own microphone, and conspicuously bent over to him to shake his hand. A polite, politically savage gesture.

When Vice President George H.W. Bush ran against Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988, the Dukakis camp was ready with a sneaky play. At the last minute, staffers rushed onto the stage with a mound covered in the same flooring as the rest of the stage. They cut out the portion of the floor where Dukakis was to stand so that he could be on an invisible, raised platform and seem taller than he really was. A box would, of course, have addressed the same height problem. But a box would have posed an irresistible lure for prying photographers. The picture of Dukakis riding in a tank with his head barely poking up was bad enough.

Carter and Dukakis?  Engaging in “sneaky play”—but only to fight the scourge of “heightism.”

Reagan, on the other hand… savage in his ability to thwart the good-faith efforts of the Democratic candidates to make the election about the issues.

See?  As a lefty, one call always grab the moral highground—even if it requires standing on a disguised box or moving cameras around.

Thompson says he intends to run as a Washington outsider, a silly but politically potent role perfected by a long line of candidates before him, including the current president. No matter how contrived the image, it seems to work pretty well. He’s an outsider only in the sense that he has not been a sitting senator since 2003. Gosh, that’s all of five years ago.

Meaning that he’s been outside government for five years, or half a decade—remember, Ms Means?  He’s a (sniff) actor, and not one of the good ones like George Clooney or Sean Penn or Tim Robbins, either— and so isn’t intricately tied to the legislation of the current Congress.

So yes, the phrase is somewhat hackneyed.  But in this case, it is also true. 

[…] he lives in posh McLean, Va., a Republican-leaning suburb of the nation’s capital. He spent decades here as a lawyer-lobbyist representing big-bucks corporations such as Equitas, a company that sought to contain foreign insurers’ liability for asbestos victims. As a senator, he had a reputation for being lazy. Yet it’s hard slogging out there on the campaign trail, which ought to either confirm or put to rest that particular rap on him.

Lookie!  It’s the progressive’s class-warfare trifecta!  He’s wealthy (unlike other prominent actors, I suppose); he was a lawyer-lobbyist representing those EVIL BIG CORPORATIONS WHO TURN PROFITS AND INVEST IN THE US!; and—when he’s not being a rich, greedy, corporate humping fatcat actor, he has a reputation (among whom it isn’t clear, as no attribution is provided) for being “lazy.”

So then.  He is, by Ms Means reckoning, a big, lazy, corporate fat cat and phony, who—when he’s not (semi) busy fighting against the rule of law—appeals mostly to those pining for Jim Crow and a return to the days of mint juleps on the porch served by smiling Negroes in bandannas, over whom they’d tower (if only vicariously) like Simon Legree.

Nice!

Thompson is already the 800-pound gorilla in the GOP contest. And size matters.

But size isn’t everything. Remember last weekend’s Belmont stakes, the last race in the Triple Crown? It was won by a filly, Rags to Riches, who beat the male Preakness winner Curlin, who was bigger but slower. There’s a filly in the Democratic presidential race, too.

‘Nuff said.

And of course that’s charmingly emblematic—whereas the Preakness and Kentucky Derby being won by the bigger “slower” horses?  Not quite so fraught, I guess.

But hey—Ms Means is a progressive.  So logical consistency is routinely marginalized in favor of emotional appeals and rhetorical sleight of hand.

The ends justify the means, after all—and here, the ends seem to be a preemptive strike on a big fat lazy rich white male who, given the chance, would bullwhip Barack Obama, then order him to go fetch some lemonade.