Fred's My Man

When Henry Kissinger met with Zhou En-Lai, the Chinese Foreign Minister, during President Nixon's visit to China, he asked him what he thought of the French Revolution. Zhou En-Lai replied, "It's too early to tell."

Truthfully, I'm not so tied to what a person thinks about issues. Things break in their own time and at their own speed and all a person can do is make the best decision they can make with the best information that they have. In my own career, I made decisions that turned out well without much thought and those that have turned for the worse despite epic quantities of hard work. What is important to me (and it's the only thing that is) is integrity.

I don't much care what a person says he believes. I'm concerned with his actions. How does he treat his wife? Is he a good friend? Those are the things you cannot lie about. Integrity, simply put, is consistency in thought, word and action. Operationally, I think it means that a person has a particular code and judges his actions against that code. That's missing in most politicians these days. What they have instead of a code is a poll. In place of a spine, they have the cobbled-together opinions of their consituency.

What is a politician's role. Is it to mindlessly respresent the will of the people or is to use his judgment to make decisons knowing that he probably has more information that those he is responsible to? Where I come down on this is obvious. Strictly representing a mob may go a long way to getting you elected but it is not good governance. The problem with American society today is that too few people are willing to believe that others just know better than they do.

What's lacking is trust and rightfully so given the shenanigans of many in power. From Abramson to Jefferson, corruption runs amuck and why should we trust those who only seek to enrich themselves it seems? That's why integrity is so important. It is the only way a Republic works. We should expect it from our politicians and reward it when we see it.

I applaud Senator Thompson's position on the Iraq War. He put it very well. People don't think enough about what might have happened if we didn't depose Saddam. I supported the need to depose Saddam but early on, I knew that this was going to get messy. Why? Simply put, on the ground, where the rubber meets the road, I could not tell the difference between a Sunni or a Shia. I could not discriminate between a foreign fighter and a native insurgent. I simply would not know who I was to shoot and that's a problem. Also, a counter-insurgency only works when you convince the civilian population that violence is not an option for them. That's why we didn't have very many problems in Japan or Germany. The respective populations were so shattered by war, they were content with anything else. You have to break the pride of the people or you cannot rebuild the country. If I was in charge, I would have levelled Falluja after the first uprising. I would have cordoned off the area and brought in the bombers. I would have killed every living thing within my perimeter. I would have gone Alexander-on-Thebes on them. At most I would have to do this one more time, but everybody would get the picture and settle down. Instead, with all our whining, we embolden our enemy. Those who don't believe this is true have never been in a fight. The first whimper you hear from your opponent makes you stronger. But we, as Americans, don't have the stomach anymore for this type of war. I don't know if that's a good thing. So a conflict that could have been short gets dragged out. But that doesn't change what Senator Thompson says to begin with. WE WOULD STILL HAVE TO BE THERE. War sucks. It's never clean and it's filled with mistakes. It's not a video game. You win it the same way you win a fight-- with will. As the old saying goes, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Having said all that, Senator Fred Thompson's my man because out of all the candidates so far, I feel he has the most integrity. Granted, I don't know the man personally and I haven't seen him very much of him on TV but from what I've seen, I would be more comfortable putting my life in his hands than any of the other candidates. Okay, he's an actor and specializes in this type of thing but then I'm not your normal observer either. My life and the lives of others has depended on my being able to read people accurately and quickly, at that. Fred my man. Give him an honest look. I think you'll see what I see.