Jay Reding.com

Fred Thompson has a lengthy video message to Iowa voters, which lays out in some detail the case for his candidacy:

What struck me about this message is that Sen. Thompson reached out to Democratic voters as well:

You know, when I’m asked which of the current group of Democratic candidates I prefer to run against, I always say it really doesn’t matter… These days all those candidates, all the Democratic leaders, are one and the same. They’re all NEA-MoveOn.org-ACLU-Michael Moore Democrats. They’ve allowed these radicals to take control of their party and dictate their course.

So this election is important not just to enact our conservative principles. This election is important to salvage a once-great political party from the grip of extremism and shake it back to its senses. It’s time to give not just Republicans but independents, and, yes, good Democrats a chance to call a halt to the leftward lurch of the once-proud party of working people.

So in seeking the nomination of my own party, I want to say something a little unusual. I am asking my fellow Republicans to vote for me not only for what I have to say to them, but for what I have to say to the members of the other party—the millions of Democrats who haven’t left the Democratic party so much as their party’s national leadership has left them.

For all the phony populism of the Democratic Party, they’re not the party of working people, no matter how much they protest to the contrary. The Democratic Party in its modern incarnation represents the interests of the secular coastal left. They have to adopt a populist veneer because if they were honest to the American people they would never win election in a country where self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals 2-1. What do they stand for? A United States with a foreign policy that fecklessly thinks that Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can be talked into ending their campaign of terrorism across the globe. A United States in which Osama bin Laden is given the same procedural rights that Tony Soprano would have. A United States of higher taxes, unlimited abortion on demand (at taxpayer expense) and a United States that would follow the failing model of Britain’s NHS or Canada’s socialized healthcare system. Is this really the United States that is envisioned by the mainstream of American society? The Democrats are deluded enough to think that if they can wrap the bitter pill of Fabian socialism in enough sugary rhetoric, the American people will swallow it.

The American people deserve better than that.

Sen. Thompson represents the basic principles of the Republican Party—a strong national defense, respect for the values which create a successful society, and the sort of limited government that our Founders intended. It seems that the primary critique of Sen. Thompson—that he doesn’t campaign hard enough—is a substance-free critique. The reality is that Sen. Thompson’s campaign is the more intellectual strenuous, the one with the best policy positions, and the clearest in its goals and objectives.

What this country needs is not someone who can claim to “feel your pain” while letting this country continue to slide. What we need is a leader, someone who is willing to make the hard decisions that will need to be made in the next few years. The next Administration will almost certainly have to deal with an entitlement crisis that will quickly consume trillions of dollars. Who is best equipped to handle that crisis? A candidate who talks about the problem or a candidate who has a plan on the table that can realistically solve it?

There’s something to be said for style, but it doesn’t substitute for real substance. This country needs solutions, not more empty rhetoric. Sen. Thompson has put those solutions on the table, which is why he deserves the support of Iowa voters this Thursday.

Fred Thompson comes out against another smear by another irresponsible reporter:

Today I had this story written about me regarding what I said at a Town Hall event in Burlington, Iowa by a reporter who wasn’t even at the event. Incidentally, I declined to be interviewed by this particular reporter yesterday for reasons which will soon be apparent.

In referring to me, she reported “he doesn’t like modern campaigning, isn’t interested in running for President, and will not be devastated” if he doesn’t win.

Below is a transcript of what I actually said in response to a question by a local Burlington resident which was the basis of the reporter’s story.

It is clear that there are those in the media who will exact a high price for candor and from those whom they consider to be insufficiently ambitious. But it is with increasing amazement that we see that those who are willing to slant or leave out important parts of a story to make their point.

I used to attribute the “lazy Thompson” narrative to nothing more than the media’s own lack of interest in real coverage—but with the number of times Sen. Thompson has been deliberately misquoted I’m starting to wonder if there’s something more at play here. I’m starting to wonder if the media isn’t afraid of Sen. Thompson. After all, the media leans heavily Democratic—and they have a vested interest in seeing the weakest possible Republican challenger to their heir apparent Hillary Clinton. That’s why the media has been playing hands-off with Mike Huckabee—they know that his pseudo-populism would fracture the economic and social wings of the Republican coalition and ensure a Clinton victory. Sen. Thompson is an authentic conservative on both fiscal and social issues. He’s strongly pro-life, he’s strong against earmarks, and when it comes to judges, Sen. Thompson is the one that President Bush chose to help Chief Justice Roberts through the Senate. Thompson would keep the Republican base together in a way that few—if any— of the other Republican hopefuls can.

No wonder they’re afraid.

What Sen. Thompson actually said in Iowa reminds me of precisely why I support Sen. Thompson’s bid for the Presidency. He isn’t a career politician, nor is he a member of the Beltway political class. From Sen. Thompson’s remarks:

If people really want in their president super type-a personality, someone who has gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night and been thinking about for years how they win the presidency of the United States, someone who can look you straight in the eye and say they enjoy every minute of campaigning, I ain’t that guy. So I hope I’ve discussed that and didn’t talk you out of anything. I honestly want – I can’t imagine a worse set of circumstances [than] achieving the Presidency of the United States under false pretenses. I go out of my way to be myself.

We’ve had enough of phony political hacks pandering to every possible group under the sun. The professional political class in this country is an affront to the values of citizen leadership that the Founders desired. Sen. Thompson has a career of civil service, but he’s hardly a member of the political class. His campaign is based strongly on ideas, not empty promises and not attempts to conceal the issues with gauzy personal narratives.

Thompson remains tied with the rest of the pack, but if substance were what mattered, he’d be winning by a large margin. The media keeps misquoting him because they have their narratives in play, and they’re scared that a solid conservative might get the Republican nomination and take the Republican Party to the White House for another four years. Republican primary voters need only concentrate on who the media wants them to vote for to know precisely who is the least fit to win. Thompson is the real thing—a conservative with solid policy prescriptions and the ability to get them enacted. That’s what the media fears, and that’s what the country most desperately needs.

As is my yearly tradition, I offer a few predictions for the new year, to be revisited (and frequently mocked) a year later. So, without further ado, this year’s predictions:

Politics/National

• Hillary Clinton defeats Obama for the Democratic Nomination. She picks Mark Warner as her running mate.
• She then narrowly loses to the Republican candidate (who is not Mike Huckabee).
• Sensing a weak field, Michael Bloomberg runs for the Presidency on a third-party ticket, picking CNN anchor Lou Dobbs Chuck Hagel as his running mate. He barely registers in the polls, despite pouring millions of his own money into the race.
• The Democrats retain control of Congress, but not be margins large enough to threaten vetos. Pelosi and Reid remain in control of their respective chambers, but end up being just as ineffectual as they have been over the last major year. Congress still does almost nothing throughout the year, and this Congress leaves with no major legislative achievements to its name.

International

• Violence in Iraq remains sporadic, as US forces slowly withdraw. Iraq becomes less and less of a domestic political issue. Al-Qaeda attempts a Tet Offensive, but it is quickly crushed thanks to solid intelligence provided by Iraqi civilians.
• The center-right remains triumphant as Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Kevin Rudd, and Stephen Harper all work towards free market reforms in their respective countries to great popular acclaim.
• The situation in Pakistan remains deeply unsettled, with Musharraf having only a tenuous hold on power.
• Iran continues to rattle sabers, and continues to enrich uranium, while the Bush Administration tries to ratchet up diplomatic pressure—to no avail.
• The Annapolis Peace Conference accomplishes nothing as once again Israel offers concessions and the Palestinians end up being too divided to offer anything in return.
• China improves its image with the Beijing Olympics.

Economics

• While the media continues to paint their picture of economic despair, the real story continues to be the “Goldilocks economy” of low unemployment, high economic growth, and steady wage growth.
• The sub-prime mortgage issue fades as the impact becomes more fully known. As the uncertainty fades, it becomes clear that the fears of recession were baseless.
• Oil prices stabilize around $100/barrel.

Society/Culture/Technology

• At MacWorld, Apple announces iTunes movie rentals - in HD, with a new Apple TV to match. They also announce an enhanced iPhone, an ultraportable MacBook with a flash-based hard drive and long battery life. Apple stock continues to climb.
• However, Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 download store starts stealing some marketshare from iTunes. More studios embrace selling their music unencumbered by DRM, leading iTunes to abandon their FairPlay DRM on music by the end of the year.
• Despite blockbusters like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Star Trek, box office receipts decline both in number of tickets and dollars grossed as the price of high-def movie equipment declines. While movie ticket sales decline, sales of HDTVs, home theater setups, and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players soar. HD-DVD players hit the $100 mark by the end of the year, meaning that HD-DVD adoption pulls away from Blu-Ray.

We’ll see how well these predictions turn out next year…

UPDATE 12/31/07: One minor change. Despite both being cranks, Bloomberg and Dobbs apparently don’t agree on much. However, Bloomberg and Sen. Chuck Hagel have met before, making them more likely political bedfellows.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: One more prediction: No Country for Old Men will win Best Picture at the Oscars. It deserves to. If you’ve not yet seen it, it’s an amazing movie because of the way it’s almost entirely built on subtext. But don’t let that dissuade you: it’s not preachy, it’s not pretentious, and it isn’t an “art house” movie. It’s just a damned good film.

Rarely do I say this but Paul Krugman could not be more right:

To all the presidential campaigns trying to claim that the atrocity in Pakistan somehow proves that they have the right candidate — please stop.

This isn’t about you; in fact, as far as I can tell, it isn’t about America. It’s about the fact that Pakistan is a very messed-up place. This has very bad consequences for us, but it’s hard to see what, if anything, it says about US policy.

Krugman is right that no matter what policy choices we might have made in the past, what’s going on in Pakistan is the natural consequence of Pakistan being a failing state. Democracy isn’t going to flourish there because there’s a sizable fraction of the population—if not an outright majority—who has no interest in democracy or peaceful coexistence. Years of poor policy choices by Pakistani leaders have created a cauldron of instability, and an event like the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was an inevitability.

However, this disaster is relevant inasmuch as it makes one consider which candidate is the best fit to lead this country in a turbulent world. Mike Huckabee has been demonstrating that he’s terminally clueless on international affairs. John Edwards once again demonstrated a complete and utter lack of common sense by calling up Musharraf during the middle of this crisis. The last thing Musharraf needed was a Presidential candidate—and not even one who has a shot of getting his party’s nomination—giving him unsolicited advice.

John Podhoretz wondered yesterday if this would spell an end to this political season’s “holiday from history” and force American politicians to get serious about the very real threats that this country will face in the future. Sadly, as Krugman points out, what we’re hearing tends to be more idle boasting than real thought.

As always, every year I make a set of predictions for the upcoming year. And every year I see how accurate I was. Last year’s predictions were a little off-the-mark. And by a little, I mean a lot. Let’s see how we did:

Iran will announce that they have completed work on a nuclear weapon and will conduct nuclear tests, showing once again how the intelligence community got it wrong.

Fortunately, not yet. I do think that the NIE is wrong, and that Iran is gathering the materials needed to make a bomb. I would be willing to bet that they’re farther along than we think. The hardest part is getting the fissile material, and the Iranians have thousands of centrifuges that can enrich uranium to weapons grade.

However, Ahmadinejad will face great political backlash as the Iranian economy begins to collapse.

Close, but no cigar. Iran’s economy is being propped up by high oil prices, and there’s some internal backlash against Ahmadinejad, but not nearly enough to put him into political jeopardy.

Iran and the US will enter a state of de facto war as Iranian naval vessels blockade the Straights of Hormuz and more Iranian fighters stream into Iraq.

Ugh, Straits of Hormuz…

Thankfully, it didn’t happen. It still could, but the Iranians seem less confrontational now.

President Bush will announce significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, as the situation in Iraq grows even more dire. His attempt to “surge” troops into Baghdad will be too little, too late, and not long enough to make a difference.

This one was totally wrong—and I’m glad to say that it was. The “surge” has certainly worked, and that’s largely because Gen. Petraeus was smart enough to make it less about having more troops and more about taking the strategies that Col. H.R. McMaster applied in Tal Afar and using them throughout Iraq. He really should have been Man of the Year, because he’s changed the history of the region in ways that will have profound repercussions for years. Gen. Petraeus is our T.H. Lawrence, except he had even more success.

The al-Maliki government will collapse when SCIRI and the Sadrists both walk out.

Dead wrong. Iraq’s coalition government is ever fractious, but it has managed to stay together.

The biggest success in the War on Terror will be when Ethopian troops take down the Islamist government in Somalia in a decisive victory.

That did happen, although the surge in Iraq rightly is the biggest victory in the war.

As a consequence of the above, the US will begin training Kurdish peshmerga to fight al-Qaeda as US troops withdraw.

It’s interesting to see the changing dynamic in northern Iraq. The Turks are striking at Kurdish terrorist groups, with our support. The Kurds don’t seem to be overreacting, much to their credit. Part of it is probably due to the fact that they’re sick of war, part of it due to the fact that Turkish companies are crucial to rebuilding Iraqi Kurdistan. Still, the Iraqi Army is doing a good enough job, and instead of Kurdish peshmerga it’s native Sunni groups who are kicking al-Qaeda out of Iraq.

Apple will release a cell phone that runs a stripped-down version of Mac OS X, creating the hottest gadget since the iPod.

Ah, the iPhone. Not perfect, but still the best cellphone ever made. Even though us early adopters got chumped. I wouldn’t trade my iPhone for a solid platinum RAZR. Mobile Safari may be a bit crash prone, and the software is still not quite up to Apple quality, the concept is so far ahead of its time that it’s still a work of technological art.

President Bush’s approval ratings will stay low, but not lower than they are now. (Which granted, isn’t saying much at this point.)

Pretty much true.

The Democratic Congress will push through a substantial tax raise, and the Bush Administration will capitulate. The stock markets will plunge in response.

President Bush has found his veto pen and apparently his cojones. If only G.W. had been this fiscally conservative when the GOP was in power…

Hizballah will continue their reign of terror in Lebanon, as Syrian forces take control of the country once again.

This hasn’t happened yet, but as Emilie Lahoud has stepped down, Syria continues to try to exert control over their neighbor. When even the French have said that enough is enough, it’s clear that Assad is not willing to cooperate. Sadly, Lebanon’s problems aren’t going away, and may yet get worse.

More critics of Vladimir Putin will find themselves dead.

Putin is still a tyrant, but he’s been more careful than in the past. Perhaps the horrendous death of Alexander Litvinenko was enough to dissuade others. The arrest of Garry Kasperov, however, demonstrates that being a Putin critic is a dangerous business in today’s authoritarian Russia.

Socialist Ségolène Royal will defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in the French elections.

Again, dead wrong. Nicolas Sarkozy could yet be the Thatcherite figure that France needs.

Barack Obama will continue to flirt with running for the Presidency throughout 2007, just to keep Hillary guessing.

Instead, he plunged into the race and is now making Hillary sweat.

John McCain will emerge as the front-runner in the 2008 GOP race while Rudy continues to keep everyone guessing as to what his intentions really are.

Rudy became the frontrunner, McCain nearly sank his campaign pretending to be one, and now the GOP race is up in the air.

All in all, a mixed bag. The biggest thing I got wrong was the “surge”, which isn’t surprising because last year I figured that it was about numbers rather than strategy. 2007 became a turning point in the war, one in which the US and the free people of Iraq have gained a decisive advantage over the enemy. Things in Iraq could still go bad very quickly, but in terms of predicting the outcome of the surge, I was dead wrong. As I was about Iran, Lebanon (to a point), and the French elections. My predictions for 2007 were a bit on the pessimistic side—fortunately, things didn’t turn out nearly as bad as they could have.

Coming up soon, my predictions for 2008.