Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening:

Conservatives unhappy with our Republican presidential candidates seem to be drifting aimlessly toward Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee in the misguided belief that these candidates are more conservative than Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. This is like breaking up with Bobby Brown so you can date Phil Spector.

On illegal immigration, Huckabee makes George Bush sound like Tom Tancredo. He has compared illegal aliens to slaves brought here in chains from Africa, saying, "I think frankly the Lord is giving us a second chance to do better than we did before."

Toward that end, when an Arkansas legislator introduced a bill that would prevent illegal aliens from voting and receiving state benefits, Huckabee denounced the bill, saying it would rile up "those who are racist and bigots."

He also made the insane point that companies like Toyota would not invest in Arkansas if the state didn't allow non-citizens to vote because it would "send the message that, essentially, 'If you don't look like us, talk like us and speak like us, we don't want you.'"

Like all the (other) Democratic candidates for president, he supports a federal law to ban smoking -- unless you're an illegal alien smoking at a Toyota plant. (I just realized why Mike Huckabee can't run for president as a Democrat -- they've already got Mike Gravel.)

Huckabee also joined with impeached president Bill Clinton in a campaign against childhood obesity. What, O.J. wasn't available?

Bill and Mike's excellent adventure lasted about one week in May 2005 -- or just long enough to burnish the image of the president who committed perjury and obstruction of justice in a civil rights suit against him, molested the help and was credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick.

Huckabee teamed up with that guy to talk to children about healthy eating habits. Ironically, the obesity campaign kicked off almost exactly nine years from the very Palm Sunday on which President Clinton used a cigar as a sexual aid on Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.

What is with Republicans? Clinton isn't your average ex-president, like Jerry Ford. This isn't even Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale.

Decent people shun Clinton, but elected Republicans keep trying to rehabilitate him. President Bush sends his own father on a feel-good "tsunami-relief campaign" with this guy, and Huckabee visits schoolchildren with him.

In 1999, Sen. Fred Thompson joined legal giants like Sens. Jim Jeffords, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to vote against removing Bill Clinton from office for perjury.

Thompson, whom President Nixon once called "dumb as hell," claimed to have carefully studied the Constitution and determined that perjury by the president of the United States did not constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors." He must have been looking at one of those living, breathing Constitutions we've heard so much about.

When the framers chose the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" for the Constitution, they were using a term taken from British parliamentary impeachments. There's a 600-year history of what this phrase means -- and Clinton met it about a dozen times before he gave a single statement under oath or suborned a single witness's testimony.

It has been used in this country and in Britain to remove one government official for making "uncivil addresses to a women," another for "notorious excesses and debaucheries" and another for "frequenting bawdy houses and consorting with harlots." Or, as Bill Clinton used to call it, "a three-day weekend."

The House didn't even impeach Clinton for his legion of "notorious excesses and debaucheries." He was impeached for excesses that also happen to be felonies. For a nation of laws, there are no more serious offenses than perjury and obstruction of justice.

The entire Supreme Court -- including the justices Clinton appointed -- boycotted Clinton's State of the Union address after his impeachment trial. That's what they thought of crimes that attack the legal system.

Rep. James Rogan lost his congressional seat because he stuck by his principles as a manager of Clinton's impeachment. Lifelong Democrat David Schippers abandoned his party's lockstep defense of Clinton to pursue Clinton's impeachment as the House Judiciary Committee's chief counsel. Rep. Henry Hyde saw an affair he had in 1965 become front-page news because he wouldn't waver from doing his job under the Constitution.

But, as The New York Times recently said, Thompson "agonized over what he saw as two 'bad choices.'"

What bad choices? Punishing a multiple felon or not punishing him? This wasn't exactly a job for King Solomon, pal.

The Times reported that calls from Thompson's Tennessee constituents showed that they "overwhelmingly favored removing President Bill Clinton from office." So Thompson could either: (1) Follow the Constitution and make his constituents happy or, (2) disregard the Constitution and make his Hollywood friends happy.

Only a handful of Republicans voted against all law and reason to keep Clinton in office, and only one of them was from Tennessee.

This isn't the time to be toying with any Republican who had a Clinton in his sights and ended up shooting himself in the foot. If you're bored with our top candidates, go see a slasher movie. Don't take it out on a presidential election.

Miss Ann is entirely correct about Huckabee. He takes George W Bush's idiotic "compassionate conservatism" to extremes that even W would baulk at.

However her analysis of Fred is misses one critically important point. Fred Thompson did vote not to impeach Bill Clinton on one of the charges, but voted to impeach him on the other. If a majority of other Senators had voted with Thompson Bill Clinton would have been ejected from office in disgrace and Al Gore would have been sworn in as president. Gore would have likely won easy election (he did win the popular vote after all) and reelection and would probably be the sitting president today.

Ann is the latest inside-the-beltway conservative pundit to line up against Fred. Apparently even though he was a Senator and a lobbyist he really is an outsider in all the ways that count.

However despite the narrative on Fred, that he is lazy, that he hasn't got the "fire in the belly", that he got in too late, that he is a poor speaker when he doesn't have a script, he is still number one or two in the polls and despite the fact that he has only been in the race for a little over a month and that most voters have only heard the negatives about him he still comes in only slightly behind Giuliani in the head-to-head matchups with Hillary.