Kudos to Holly Bailey over at Brand X for digging up these, ahem, unorthodox examples of senatorial rhetoric from Fred Thompson’s papers at the University of Tennessee. First, a purplish (maybe even blue?) regret:
In 1998, when Thompson was a Republican senator and a single man about town, New York socialite Georgette Mosbacher invited him to accompany her on an overseas trip. Thompson couldn’t go, and summoned the full measure of his Tennessee charm in letting her down. “I am sitting here with a long face and broken heart as I contemplate sunsets on the Mediterranean, which I will not see,” he wrote to Mosbacher on his official Senate stationery. “We must remember the unspoken vow that all United States senators take upon entering the Senate: I shall have no money, and I shall have no fun. I, of course regarding myself as an unconquerable soul, am still determined to break the second part of that vow.”
Uh-huh.
And this, this is just gross:
“If the President is going to have any good cigars left over,” he relayed to Clinton, who had once sent him a stogie, “in the spirit of bipartisanship I might be willing to help him out.”
At least he didn’t say anything about “working the pole.”