Fred Thompson Interview

My buddy Dave the Beer Man is a big supporter of Fred Thompson, and he e-mailed me this transcript from Fox News Sunday:


WALLACE: [L]et's do a lightning round quick questions, quick answers, a variety of issues to see where Fred Thompson stands.

THOMPSON: Um hmm.

WALLACE: Abortion.

THOMPSON: Pro-life.

WALLACE: Would you like to overturn Roe. ...

THOMPSON: You said lightning round, now. If you want ...

WALLACE: Well, let's go.

THOMPSON: ... more, give me another question. I'll work through it.

WALLACE: Do you want to overturn Roe vs. Wade?

THOMPSON: I think Roe vs. Wade was bad law and bad medical science. And the way to address that is through good judges. I don't think the court ought to wake up one day and make new social policy for the country. It's contrary to what it's been the past 200 years.

We have a process in this country to do that. Judges shouldn't be doing that. That's what happened in that case. I think it was wrong.

WALLACE: Gay rights.

THOMPSON: Gay rights? I think that we ought to be a tolerant nation. I think we ought to be tolerant people. But we shouldn't set up special categories for anybody.

And I'm for the rights of everybody, including gays, but not any special rights.

WALLACE: So, gay marriage? You're against.

THOMPSON: Yes. You know, marriage is between a man and a woman, and I don't believe judges ought to come along and change that.

WALLACE: What about civil unions?

THOMPSON: I think that that ought to be left up to the states. I personally do not think that that is a good idea, but I believe in many of these cases where there's real dispute in the country, these things are not going to be ever resolved.

People are going to have different ideas. That's why we have states. We ought to give great leeway to states and not have the federal government and not have the Supreme Court of the United States making social policy that's contrary to the traditions of this country and changing that overnight. And that's what's happened in a lot of these areas.

WALLACE: Gun control.

THOMPSON: Well, I'm against gun control generally. You know, you check my record. You'll find I'm pretty consistent on that issue.

WALLACE: So this federal court appeals court ruling this last week, I guess Friday, in the case of D.C. you'd be perfectly happy to have people have handguns in their homes?

THOMPSON: Yes. Absolutely. The court basically said the Constitution means what it says, and I agree with that.

WALLACE: On the other hand, you have taken some stands that conservatives may not like. For instance, you voted for John McCain's campaign finance reform.

THOMPSON: I came from the outside to Congress. And it always seemed strange to me. We've got a situation where people could give politicians huge sums of money, which is the soft money situation at that time, and then come before those same politicians and ask them to pass legislation for them.

I mean, you get thrown in jail for stuff like that in the real world. And so I always thought that there was some reasonable limitation that ought to be put on that, and you know, looking back on history, Barry Goldwater in his heyday felt the same thing.

So that's not a non-conservative position, although I agree that a lot of people have interpreted it that way.

WALLACE: You also favor comprehensive immigration reform. I want to...

THOMPSON: No, no, no, no.

WALLACE: Well, let me put up on the screen something that you said last year about illegals, and let's take a look at it. "You're going to have to, in some way, work out a deal where they can have some aspirations of citizenship but not make it so easy that it's unfair to the people waiting in line and abiding by the law."

Now, you said, "Look, it's just not realistic that we're going to round up 12 million people and ship them all out of the country."

THOMPSON: Well, that's true, as a general statement. We woke up one day after years of neglect and apparently discovered that we have somewhere between 12 million and 20 million illegal aliens in this country. So it became an impossible situation to deal with.

I mean, there's really no good solution. So what do you do? You have to start over. Well, I'm concerned about the next 12 million or 20 million. So that's why enforcement, and enforcement at the border, has to be primary.

I think most people feel disillusioned after 1986 when we had this deal offered to them before, and now we're insisting that, you know, we solve the security problem first, and then we'll talk about what to do with regard to other things — certainly no amnesty or nothing blanket like that.

But figure out some way to make some differentiation between the kind of people that we have here.

You know, if you have the right kind of policies, and you're not encouraging people to come here and encouraging them to stay once they're here, they'll go back, many of them, of their own volition, instead of having to, you know, load up moving vans and rounding people up. That's not going to happen.

WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?

THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing. I know it's not popular right now, but I think we have to look down the road and consider the consequences of where we are.

We're the leader of the free world whether we like it or not. People are looking to us to test our resolve and see what we're willing to do in resolving the situation that we have there. People think that if we hadn't gone down there, things would have been lovely.

If Saddam Hussein was still around today with his sons looking at Iran developing a nuclear capability, he undoubtedly would have reconstituted his nuclear capability. Things would be worse than what they are today.

We've got to rectify the mistakes that we've made. We went in there too light, wrong rules of engagement, wrong strategy, placed too much emphasis on just holding things in place while we built up the Iraqi army, took longer than we figured.

Wars are full of mistakes. You rectify things. I think we're doing that now. We're coming in with good people. We're coming in with a lot of different people. I know General Petraeus from when he was in Tennessee at Fort Campbell. He believes in the plan. He's convinced me that they can do the job.

Why would we not take any chance, even though there's certainly no guarantees, to not be run out of that place? I mean, we've got to take that opportunity and give it a chance to work.

WALLACE: One area where you have been critical of President Bush is that you say that he never spread the burden, he never made all Americans share in the sacrifice.

And you have talked about the fact that we need to end our dependence on foreign oil. Would you impose a gas tax to push us in that direction?

THOMPSON: Well, you're getting a little bit further down in the weeds than I want to go right now. I don't know. I'm studying it. I don't know the answer to that question.

We're going to have to do some things differently. We're going to have to think differently about solutions.

You know, it's a price matter more than anything else. You know, gas is — I mean, oil is fungible. And there's going to be oil in different parts of the world having a price set, you know, that we're going to have to live with one way or another.

We can't ever be totally independent of it, but we can do some things to make it a lot better. We're going to have to look at fuel emission standards and things of that nature, things that we don't like to look at.

And things have got to be on the table, because we can't keep funding a part of the world that's causing us so much problems.

WALLACE: You are on the steering committee of the Scooter Libby Defense Fund.

THOMPSON: That's right.

WALLACE: And you helped raise millions of dollars for his extraordinary legal expenses. Would President Thompson you like the sound of that probably. Would President Thompson pardon Libby now or would you wait until all of his legal appeals are exhausted?

THOMPSON: I'd do it now.

WALLACE: Because?

THOMPSON: I'd do it now. This is a trial that never would have been brought in any other part of the world. This is a miscarriage of justice.

One man and his wife and 14-year-old and 10-year-old children are bearing the brunt of a political maelstrom here that produced something that never should have come about.

These people knew in the very beginning — the Justice Department, this Justice Department and the special counsel knew in the very beginning that the thing that was creating the controversy, who leaked Valerie Plame's name, did not constitute a violation of the law.

And then they knew that it — someone did leak the name. And it was Mr. Armitage. It wasn't Scooter Libby.

But he evidently wasn't a designated bad guy, so they passed over that and spent the next year drilling in a dry well and finally got some inconsistencies or some failure to remember out of Mr. Libby and made a prosecution out of it and went to trial on a he-said, she-said perjury case and faulty memory, when practically every witness in the trial either had inconsistent statements, told the FBI one thing, told the grand jury something else, inconsistent between the witnesses that were presented at the case, and sometimes both.

And yet at the end of the day, the only person that the jury got an opportunity to pass judgment on was Scooter Libby. It's not fair. And I would do anything that I could to alleviate that.

He called being compared to Ronald Reagan, a "no-win situatio[n]."

We've got an entitlement program that's bankrupting us. We've got things going on in Thailand, in Indonesia, in places that nobody ever talks about anymore that could impact on us.

We've got Chinese government who we're mutually economically dependent upon right now. But you know, they're still a totalitarian government that is building up their military tremendously and has 200 missiles pointed toward Taiwan.

Those are all things that are going to have to be dealt with. And the American people, we've learned, are going to have to be brought along with the process and with what's going on be honest with them and inspire them to do the right thing.

There was no polish put on his presentation but that which comes naturally to him. I don't fawn, but Fred Thompson was refreshing this morning and I'm anxious to see where this leads.


Now, I have problems with several positions taken by Thompson. I was revolted by his vote for McCain`s Temper Tantrum aka Campaign Finance Reform, I didn`t care for his immigration views, although he acquittedited himself well in clarifying his position. Also, Thompson voted against the conviction in the impeachment trial of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, something I find difficult to forgive, since Mr. Clinton had used the Constitution as his personal toilet paper, and had broken numerous laws-including illegally prosecuting Billy Dale from the White House Travel Office, stealing raw files on his political enemies, then failing to return them after being so ordered by a court, breaking sexual harassment laws, obstructing justice, perjuring himself, etc., etc. It was the duty of the Congress of the United States to exercise their Constitutional authority and remove such a scoundrel, yet the Republican majority feared the political consequences of such an act-and Mr. Thompson voted to continue the political game as defined by the Clinton machine.

Had Clinton been removed from office, the radicalization of the Democrat Party may not hoccurredured; the Left gets their power because of the money they can raise, and one either must crawl to the Clinton machine or to Moveon and Soros. Had Clinton been removed the one side of the equation would have splintered, and the money which the Clinton`s can raise (and horde) would be passed around more amicably. Granted, the Moron.ogr crowd would still be powerful because of their money, but I suspect the diffusion of funds would have opened the party structure so that more moderate individuals could make it without having to go hat-in-hand to Sores. Now there are simply no options, and so to make it in the Party one must kowtow to the Left-or the Clintonistas.

I fear Mr. Thompson, and the other Republicans who did not support Impeachment, made a tactical error as well as a moral one; certainly removing such a miscreant as Bill from an office for which he was clearly not fit was a duty they were required to perform. When one shirks a duty one usually pays a bitter price.

At any rate, Thompson does look good, by and large, and will be a formidable candidate. I do not think the big three-McCain, Giuliani, and Romney-can win in the general election. They all have too much baggage, and not enough ``freshness``. Also, I have never believed in this business about universal appeal; someone who appeals to moderates is someone lacking a core. People want to see someone who acts on the courage of their convictions, and a true conservative is the only acceptable example from the Republican side. (Nobody will vote for a true liberal in America.)

Time will tell.