On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republican senate candidate Tommy Thompson finally publicly addressed the controversy consuming his campaign: the stupid birther joke his son told a Republican crowd the weekend before. Thompson tried to make it all go away by saying his son has apologized for it (which he still hasn't done publicly), that he "feels miserable about it," so leave him alone already, and most remarkably, that it's not his fault he said it because someone else said it before he did and, bizarrely, "If you look at the movie, he didn't say it."
Turns out Jason's going to be feeling even more miserable. Yes, there's a second movie, from Oct. 6, when the younger Thompson represented his father’s campaign at the “United in Freedom” rally in Fond du Lac.
Thompson: "We have an opportunity to send President Obama back to Chicago."
Audience member: "Back to Kenya"
Thompson: "That would even be better."
Note the total lack of effort there by Thompson to either ignore the stupid birther in the audience, or to correct the idiot. No, he piles on. What's more, he incorporates that line into his stump speech, and uses it directly a week later when he tells the crowd at the
RNC luncheon, "We have the opportunity to send President Obama back to Chicago—or Kenya." Give both Thompsons the benefit of the doubt and say maybe an audience member in the second crowd did prompt the dumb joke. That's at least the second opportunity for Thompson the younger to shut down the conspiracy theory, and the second failure, that we know of.
Whatever private apologies Jason Thompson has made, and however much his father wants to pooh-pooh it into going away, it won't. Here's the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorializing on the issue:
Sorry, Thompsons, but you're not getting off the hook that easily. [...]
It's an outrageous statement that no amount of walking back by Thompson & Thompson or the Michael Best & Friedrich law firm, where the younger man works, can erase.
This one isn't going to go away. Thompson should be worrying about how many more movies are out there.
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