Did Fred once lobby for an abortion “rights” group (via Ambinder) to try to get the “gag rule” restriction eased?  Members of the group say yes, and Fred, naturally, denies it.  Hm…who has more reason to deceive?  I was somewhat skeptical, but then this part of the article persuaded me that Fred had done the deed:

At one of the meals, she recalled, Thompson re-enacted a cowboy death scene from one of his movies.

That sounds like something Fred would do. 

This will probably not seriously hurt Fred’s appeal with GOP primary voters, since that appeal is based on so much smoke and mirrors in the first place.  It isn’t as if people are rallying around him because he is such a great champion of conservative causes, but rather because he is simply not as bad as the major competition.  In the end, he could have saved himself a lot of grief by admitting that he once did do this lobbying work, but subsequently viewed the matter very differently.  Instead of having it be a blot on his record with conservatives, he could have used it to show the sharp contrast between his former lobbying and his voting record, which is actually fairly good.  This will obviously not help with pro-lifers, who can hardly be thrilled that he blew of a big NRLC meeting and went overseas to spout Liz Cheney’s propaganda in Britain instead.