Glenn Dismantles the New "Tough Guy" Candidate

When Glenn Greenwald gets on a roll, he is a thing to behold. He goes back and gets the goods, the documentation. Nobody is better at using Google and Nexis to dig out what actually happened and what people actually said. In this case, Fred Thompson's posturing persona gets ripped... and Chris Matthews, the drooling clown, and the fawning Howard Fineman get baked too. It's fun.

Though Thompson does not mention it, he also has been -- for two decades -- what a 1996 profile in The Washington Monthly described as "a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests." This folksy, down-home, regular guy has spent his entire adult life as a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, except when he was an actor in Hollywood.

And -- like the vast, vast majority of Republican "tough guys" who play-act the role so arousingly for our media stars, from Rudy Giuliani to Newt Gingrich -- Thompson has no military service despite having been of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War (Thompson turned 20 in 1962, Gingrich in 1963, Giuliani in 1964). He was active in Republican politics as early as the mid-1960s, which means he almost certainly supported the war in which he did not fight.