Politics & Power Quote by Fred Thompson

“Good intention” is doing a lot of political work here. Fred Thompson’s line doesn’t argue against Superfund outright; it stages a preemptive concession that lets him critique the program without sounding pro-pollution. By foregrounding motive instead of outcomes, he shifts the debate from whether toxic sites should be cleaned up (an easy yes) to whether the federal machinery built to do it is clumsy, unfair, or economically distorting. It’s classic Washington jiu-jitsu: praise the goal, question the instrument.

The subtext reads like a warning label for regulation. Superfund, created in 1980 in the shadow of Love Canal and mounting public panic about industrial contamination, made the government the backstop cleaner and empowered it to chase “potentially responsible parties” for costs. Thompson’s formulation nods to the moral urgency that birthed the law while quietly teeing up the familiar conservative critique that noble legislation can metastasize into litigation, bureaucracy, and unpredictable liability. “Good intention” implies the possibility of bad incentives: companies over-lawyering, redevelopment stalled by fear of inherited contamination, cleanup priorities skewed by politics rather than risk.

As a politician, Thompson also signals a certain kind of reasonableness. He’s not denying environmental harm; he’s attempting to claim the pragmatic middle ground where you can respect the public’s demand for accountability while inviting skepticism about how the state enforces it. The sentence is calibrated for an audience that wants to feel ethically aligned with cleanup efforts but fiscally and procedurally anxious about what comes after the moral consensus.