The fact is the Thompson campaign lied and is now engaging in damage control. The latest spin is to claim Thompson was merely providing legal advice. Even the staunchest GOPer surely must have difficulty with this line of defense. Thompson's value as a lobbyist is and was to provide access. A group hires Fred Thompson not for his legal acumen but for the fact he can get his phone calls to senior GOP officeholders returned. If you want legal advice, you could get far better legal expertise, far less expensive.

Other spin is that Thompson's lobbying on behalf of the pro-choice group was 'only' about 20 hours. Once more, Thompson was hired to furnish access--not to devlop some complex legal analysis.

As to the "no recollection"--this seems to be the new GOP mantra. It is deeply unlikely Fred Thompson doesn't recollect; after all, a lawyer or a lobbyist will maintain a list of his or her clients (and the nature of the work) as part of his or her resume/corporate experience. Certainly Arent Fox did and if Thompson were unsure, he could have easily checked. Instead, he chose to lie.

He hasn't practiced law at that firm since he left? Where did his cases go? Where do they store cases from 10/15 years ago in large lawfirms?

Also, 22 hours really isn't that much. I worked social services in the early 90's, and while I can recall some of the major crisis families I worked with, I really couldn't tell you anything about half the kids that were on my caseload-now one of those kids could say I did X, Y, and Z, but I can honestly say I probably wouldn't recall any of it, and I wouldn't have an easy way to access paperwork to say exactly what I did. I may not even recall having a certain kid on my case load.

22 hours over 15 months works out to less than two hours a month spent on this stuff-that really isn't much work at all.

A multiple choice quiz for you. Someone claims that you did something ten years ago that might be embarrassing. It would be a simple matter for you to check whether or not the allegation is true or not. Do you a) categorically deny the incident ever took place without first checking, b) assassinate the character of the person making the accusation, c) check the veracity of the statement and respond accordingly, or d) ignore it.

To my mind two of these choices are honest and the other two are not.

Think back to what you were doing professionally ten years ago. (I'll make it easy)

Now name all your co-workers from that time.

Now name your customers.

Now name your co-workers' customers who you may have helped out with.

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LIAR!!!!

You aren't being fair. 22 phone calls is nothing. The guy probably made 50 phone calls a week. I've been a lawyer for 2 years, and I can't recall anything about some of the projects I spent 2 weeks on without going back to look at the files.

In this case, though, I keep coming back to 22 conversations with the woman whose charges he was denying. It’s hard for me to swallow that, even 15 years later, Thompson wouldn’t have at least some fuzzy recollection, much less that he’d send a spokesman out to issue a vehement, categorical denial.

One important point that gets lost in this discussion is that Fred Thompson is well known as a ladies man. For someone aggressively playing the field like Fred, he probably had thousands of conversations with broads.

While current pics of Desarno suggest that she has the typical feminist look, it is entirely possible that she was a half-way decent looking bird back in '92.

Like any good player, Fred was probably up for the challenge of conquest vis a vis a lady with repugnant political views and used the multiple conversations to soften her up.

When he finally realized that she was feminist, through and through, he dropped her like a hot potato and moved on to concentrate on some other dames.

This makes it pretty likely that he could forget her. Players are just LIKE THAT.

And that's my own recollection; now imagine if I were to have a spokesman, who has no personal knowledge of what I did 15 years ago, and has to rely on asking me quick questions between my other engagements, he might very well categorically deny that I did anything of the sort.