A short little diary on something I hope is still virgin topic matter.
Tonight, while zipping around doing stuff I should have done a long time ago, I overheard Joe Scarborough twice tease an upcoming story on how the LA Times was attacking Fred Thompson because he once played a white supremacist on a TV show.
I thought to myself, ‘Oh God no.’ Surely, a LA-based newspaper in the shadow of Ronald Reagan and Arnold wouldn’t do such a thing. My ears still ring from our collective howl over Senator George Allen’s desperate and ridicules attack on Jim Webb’s books for containing some very mature passages.
The fire's down below....
Yet there it was, again and again, a progressively-leaning paper trying to take down the Republican, at least according to Joe it was. Well I have to admit that I missed the actual coverage of the "hit piece." Had other stuff to do, but I made it a point to look up the story.
And here are a few of the first sentences in the "hit piece":
Will Fred Thompson's racist role have political repercussions?
Ronald Reagan became president even though he worked with chimps in B movies.
Arnold Schwarzenegger played a murderous robot, and that didn't keep him from becoming governor.
So can "Law & Order" actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) become the first presidential candidate with this credit? Thompson played a white supremacist, spewing anti-Semitic comments and fondling an autographed copy of "Mein Kampf" on a television drama 19 years ago...
First person quoted in article said the idea's absurd:
"Do you call Tom Cruise a killer because he played one in a movie?" asked show creator and writer Stephen J. Cannell.
Yeah, I agree. I don't think Sean Penn is a rapist either, but he played one in at least two roles. For that matter, I don't think Tim Robbins a semi-professional baseball pitcher because he once played one of those.
So why write this "hit piece" Times?
But in the age of YouTube, this performance could raise an intriguing political question: How does a performer eyeing a presidential run deal with a video history that can be downloaded, taken out of context, chopped into embarrassing pieces and then distributed endlessly though cyberspace?
This is a hit, Joe?
That's exactly why there's so much potential for partisan mischief in Thompson's "Wiseguy" role. In some ways, Thompson is too good an actor and looks too convincing in the part — a problem Schwarzenegger never had.
If Thompson's old TV roles do play a part in his presidential campaign, then the long relationship between Hollywood and politics will have entered a new era — an actor's dream and a candidate's nightmare — a world where nothing you ever said is forgotten.
Ms. Daunt's story is topical, written not out of the blue, Thompson was stumping Orange County over the weekend, and if there's any step over the journalistic red line it's probably making this conclusion:
...Thompson is too good an actor and looks too convincing in the part — a problem Schwarzenegger never had.
So if there's a slant to this otherwise interesting article, it's that the writer thinks Thompson is a better actor than Schwarzenegger. Damned liberal media...
Yeah Joe, I didn't have time to watch your actual coverage of the story, just heard you tease it twice. However, unlike a lot of people, I went to read it. And how much do you care to bet we'll hear the "Scarborough tease" version on Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, et gall in the coming days?
With apologies to everyone's favorite news channel for borrowing their tagline to slam one of their competitors, they reported and I decided. Scarborough is the crooked "journalist" here...