Buddy Loaned Thompson Plane + Buddy Had Been Busted for Drugs = Scandal?
Nearly 30 years ago someone sold some marijuana. The same person over the next several years gets into various scrapes involving drugs.
Fast forward to 2007 and that person loans a buddy, who happens to be a presidential candidate his jet to make some trips. If you’re Fred Thompson, that means it’s going to be spun like you’re a criminal mastermind.
Such is the stuff that passes for scandal these days.
It’s not enough that the person running for high office be vetted: everyone he knows, associated with, grew up with or has employed has to pass a test of character that most reporters would fail.
No wonder Fred Thompson waited so long to enter the election process. No doubt, he’s shaking his head and sorry that his buddy’s long-lost past got splashed on the pages of a Washington Post that apparently was in need of copy.
More guilt by association from the Washington Post:
Republican presidential candidate Fred D. Thompson has been crisscrossing the country since early this summer on a private jet lent to him by a businessman and close adviser who has a criminal record for drug dealing.
Read the rest of the story:
Fred Thompson: Sad Day for the ScandalmongersÂ
Sources:
Fred Thompson: Sad Day for the Scandalmongers
Mondoreb blogs at Death By 1000 Papercuts. Interested readers can e-mail him at
mondoreb@gmail.com.
5 users commented in " Fred Thompson’s Criminal Advisor: Sad Day for the Scandalmongers "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackInteresting take on what you contend is an Un-Story.
What would really make it an Un-Story is if consentual adult marijuana transactions were never crimes to begin with.
Otherwise, this story would read like this: “It was revealed today that a top campaign advisor to Fred Thompson had once been arrested and convicted for selling beer and bourbon whiskey.”
That would have merited ink from 1919 to 1933. Then America wised up and let adults manufacture, buy, sell and drink alcoholic beverages. The gang violence and police corruption (one out of five US cops on the pad of bootleggers and rumrunners) ended overnight, and the huge alcohol industry paid its taxes.
There’s a scandal here, but it’s not Thompson’s campaign advisor.
It’s the War On Drugs, and its ghastly consequence: The Land of the Free is now the largest prison on Earth, with 2,300,000 children, women and men behind bars — most of that for non-violent consentual adult drug crimes. We’re doing the Prohibition thing all over again, and getting exactly the same results: Gang violence, mass incarceration, and law-enforcement corruption.
And since Phil Martin was white, and it seems well-connected, he only got probation for crimes that would have landed any minority in the slammer for quite a long time. On top of the absurdity of the War on Drugs, that should be the real outrage in this case.
After watching Meet the Press I’m shocked that the story isn’t “A vote for Thompson is a vote for thermo nuclear war” This guy is clearly insane. He said Diplomacy with Iran is impossible they don’t think like humans so we must bomb them. I’ve seen more gray matter in a thimble.
# Oli Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 4:51 am
And since Phil Martin was white, and it seems well-connected, he only got probation for crimes that would have landed any minority in the slammer for quite a long time. On top of the absurdity of the War on Drugs, that should be the real outrage in this case.
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Well, I wanted to keep it short, but the War On Drugs and the wonderful benefits its won for the Land Of The Free, really demands a book the length of War and Peace.
But yes, you’ve written the next chapter: Since the War On Drugs began, it’s been all about imprisoning and disenfranchising black and Hispanics, and relentlessly designed to give whites a free pass for the identical acts which put minorities behind bars for decades.
What’s your favorite form of the cocaine molecule? White suburban white powder? Or inner-city crack? To a chemist, an Andes farmer, or a smuggler, they’re exactly the same. But to federal and state drug laws, you need to be caught with 100 times more weight of powder to earn the same mandatory minimum prison sentence you get with crack. And what’s the real reason for the disparity? Blacks do crack, whites do powder.
In 1971 Nixon overruled his own Schafer Commission’s conclusion calling for the decriminalization of marijuana, created the DEA, launched the modern War On Drugs, and put pot in the same criminal schedule as heroin. In 1997, his top aide John Ehrlichman said in an interview:
“Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn’t resist it.”
Yeah, I really liked how Thompson said his buddy paid his debt to society. Except for two nights being booked, he never saw the inside of a jail cell. He’s white, he deserves a second chance.
And a third chance. And a fourth chance.
I’d give Thompson another look if he concluded from this embarrassment that the real villain is the War and Drugs, and that as president he’d lead us out of the racist Gulag model and to the medical treatment model. When you suspect your kid has a drug problem, who do you call? The cops? Or the family doctor? What’s going to help your kid get past it? A month in rehab? Or five years in prison?
V dude: It’s the War On Drugs, and its ghastly consequence: The Land of the Free is now the largest prison on Earth, with 2,300,000 children, women and men behind bars — most of that for non-violent consentual adult drug crimes. We’re doing the Prohibition thing all over again, and getting exactly the same results: Gang violence, mass incarceration, and law-enforcement corruption.
Right on the Money! If you have any more info, contribute it to the monthly
Special Edition, The Failed War on Drugs. November 17 is the next edition.
Email me for more info or to email links to anti-drug war articles or posts you
may be aware of that you want help spreading.
thanx for your post!
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