FRED THOMPSON, SCOOTER LIBBY AND RICHARD NIXON, THE THREE MOUSEGETEERS... THREE BLIND MICE?

Not being much of a country label, my old company didn't have a lot of bands from Tennessee-- and even the few country artists we had mostly came from Canada, like k.d. lang and Paul Brandt. But we signed this really cool alt-rock band from Knoxville, the Judybats, and one of their songs popped into my mind this morning when I was thinking about the young Fred Thompson. It wasn't even because the Judybats and Thompson all came from Tennessee. It had more to do with one of my favorite Judybats songs, "Ugly on the Outside." And it isn't because of Freddy Thompson's looks that the song started going through my head. Thompson is ugly as sin all right, but his ugliness is on the inside, unlike the love interest in the Judybats tune.

Lately DWT readers have been treated to quite a lot about Thompson's repulsive record as a sleazy Inside the Beltway lobbyist and how he set his two sons, Freddy, Jr (AKA- "Tony") and Danny, up as conduits for corporations seeking to bribe him while he was, briefly, a U.S. Senator.

Even earlier than that, though, Freddy was already showing the real ugliness in his heart and soul that now threaten the U.S. as he vies with the severely damaged Rudy McRomney for the GOP presidential nomination. On this slow news day-- a somewhat mournful Independence Day two days after the mask of constitutional government slipped off Bush's smug face to expose the brutal GOP fascist beast beneath, the Boston Globe unmasks the real Fred Thompson-- a real scumbag.

Thompson made his bones working as a lawyer for Tennessee Republican Howard Baker during the impeachment hearing for the only American president held in as much disdain as the currently unimpeached one. But, now it turns out that Thompson was a spy, or a secret mole, for the Nixon criminal clique in the White House.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong, who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

...The view of Thompson as a Nixon mole is strikingly at odds with the former Tennessee senator's longtime image as an independent-minded prosecutor who helped bring down the president he admired. Indeed, the website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee boasts that he "gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office." It is an image that has been solidified by Thompson's portrayal of a tough-talking prosecutor in the television series "Law and Order."

Thompson was always wrong about Nixon-- insisting hysterically that "there would be nothing incriminating" about the Nixon tapes-- and more recently he has shown how his stripes are unchanged to this day, leading the efforts to free Irving Libby (AKA- "Scooter") in order to deprive the investigation of the treasonous-- wartime treasonous-- outing of a CIA agent at the upper reaches of the Bush Regime of the only tool they had to get to the bottom of the crime. The Globe sagely juxtaposes Thompson's narrow partisan efforts on behalf of Libby to his support for Nixon:

Thompson declared in a June 6 radio commentary that Libby's conviction was a "shocking injustice . . . created and enabled by federal officials." Bush on Monday commuted Libby's 30-month sentence, stopping short of a pardon.

The intensity of Thompson's remarks about Libby is reminiscent of how he initially felt about Nixon. Few Republicans were stronger believers in Nixon during the early days of Watergate.

The revelations in today's Globe look to me that rather than taking credit for helping to bring Nixon to Justice, which is how Freddy has tried to re-write history, we all need to face up the fact that the latest Republican hero was suggesting Nixon destroy the evidence of his crimes. At the time, most observers of the impeachment investigation were more than suspicious that Thompson was leaking-- with or without Baker's knowledge-- inside info to Nixon and most people thought Thompson would be fired. He wasn't fired and he kept feeding Nixon information to help him counter the evidence building against him.

On July 13, 1973, Armstrong, the Democratic staffer, asked Butterfield a series of questions during a private session that led up to the revelation. He then turned the questioning over to a Republican staffer, Don Sanders, who asked Butterfield the question that led to the mention of the taping system.

To the astonishment of everyone in the room, Butterfield admitted the taping system existed.
When Thompson learned of Butterfield's admission, he leaked the revelation to Nixon's counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt.

"Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home" to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system, Thompson wrote. "I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action."

Appropriate action today, some three and a half decades later, would be for the American people to tell Freddy Thompson to take his lies and his conniving heart and ugly insides back to Hollywood where he can act all he wants and let our country recover from the damage inflicted on us by his political party.