It’s the campaign all the kids are sure to talk about: Grandpa Buford is gonna give you a whuppin!

Thompson, for his part, answered with Southern-fried aplomb. “Did you ever see the movie ’Walking Tall’?” he said, referring to the 1973 action flick about Buford Pusser, a Tennessee sheriff who single-handedly rid his town of crime and corruption. “You know the ax handle that old Buford used to carry? I got me one of them. I knew Buford Pusser. His daughter gave me one of those ax handles and I still got it. I thought about it many, many times. There’s a lot you can do with that.”

I suppose “the Pusser” wouldn’t be right…

The romantics in the current Republican Party herald back to the 1980 Reagan coalition and his victory born of the “three-legged stool” of Reagan Conservatism: a strong defense, a strong economy and strong social values.

Now, over two decades later, the incongruity among those three ideals haunts the Republican presidential nomination process. As the plethora of Republican candidates stake their claims, the dissatisfaction of the Republican electorate over their choices reflects the fact that it is impossible to obtain all three of the Reagan goals simultaneously.  Read more 

Whatever entity, higher being or biological process that created human beings made a number of mistakes. Chief among them is our need for sleep.

So often we have more ideas than time. Of course, this is preferable to having too much time and no idea what to do with it. But if we just didn’t have to do this “sleep thing” we could get so much more accomplished. Maybe insomnia isn’t such a bad thing?

The idea of sleep elimination could be a bipartisan issue. Think of all the terrorist plots Jack Bower thwarts in only 24 hours when he doesn’t sleep a wink. President Rudy or Romney could torture (or interrogate using enhanced techniques) around the clock. Imagine how safe we’d all be then!  Read more 

Just wondering, is all. Just wondering. It’s probably nothing.

++++

From the Leno transcript [DCOW]:

[THOMPSON] I think there will be decisions made in the next few years that are going to impact our lives and the lives of our kids and grandkids for a long, long time. They’re going to determine whether or not we’re a weaker, less prosperous, more divided nation than we have been. We can’t let that happen on our watch.

Huh? Fred—if I may call you Fred—your party is the party that has made us more divided, weaker, and less prosperous because of decisions you already made “on yourwatch”! And now you want to fix your own mess?  Read more 

Here. Make up your own jokes!  Read more 

One of those moments Molly should be here for.

[Welcome National Review readers. The password is still “specimen jar.” Oh, you won’t be returning here to apologize? That’s okay, we didn’t expect you to.]

So, it turns out, according to billing records from the lobby shop he worked for, Fred Thompson did do lobbying work for that pro-choice organization in the early nineties, just as Judith DeSarno claimed he had, complete with minutes of an executive board meeting discussing his work, and her memeories of a lunch at which “Fred” amusingly acted out a death scene from his latest film, which DeSarno remembered having involved cowboys.  Read more 

[Welcome, NRO readers. Check out the wet bar. Tell ’em the guy under the stairs sent you. The password is “specimen jar.”]

Plus, there’s documents, and witnesses, ’n’ stuff.

There’s something so wholesome and satisfying about a splatterfest of exploding winger heads. LA Times:

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as a “pro-life” Republican, accepted a lobbying assignment from a family-planning group to persuade the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and five people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the former senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. show that the group hired Thompson that year.

Snicker. Either the spokesperson is reflexively lying (he is, after all, a Republican), and/or the Thompson campaign really isn’t ready for prime time.

I mean, shouldn’t they have gotten their stories straight first?

And the Bushes would have sent an enforcer and dealt with the matter in the usual ways: buying silence, destroying the records, discrediting the source, releasing near-real records salted with disinformation… All the usual plays. So what’s the deal with Thompson? What is this, amateur hour?  Read more 

But who cares? He’s got shoulders you could land a bottle of English leather on! The Glob:

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, “At That Point in Time,” Thompson said he acted with “no authority” in divulging the committee’s knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon’s resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson’s actions.

“Thompson was a mole for the White House,” Armstrong said in an interview. “Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was.”

But Thompson can crack wise, in his genial, entirely genuine actorly manner, with the best of ’em:  Read more 

Now that the French have elected one of their ideological soulmates, the wingers are sucking up to them. At least the, er, flexible ones, like Fred Thompson, who just oozes sincerity when he writes:

“Maybe it’s time to rethink the ’boycott France’ movement” over Iraq, Thompson wrote in early May. “This would be a good time to toast Monsieur Sarkozy. And if you’re going to use wine for that toast, make it French wine.”

Hey, if the French are really, really good, maybe we’ll let them put some of our prison camps on their territory! I mean, seriously, what torturer wants to spend down-time in Bucharest when they could be in Paris instead!

That would be quite a U-turn from the bitterness tied to France’s opposition to the war in Iraq, when US conservatives renamed “French fries” as “Freedom fries,” branded France “Our Oldest Enemy” and recycled a line from “The Simpsons” animated comedy that mocked “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

Of course, some remain invincibly rigid:  Read more 

The press works the pole on Thompson:

Thompson looms over Republican debate
Thompson, the six-foot-six (two metres) star of television show “Law & Order”….

Jeebus, guys, wipe your chins, wouldja? Personally, I don’t give a ratfucker’s ass about Thompson’s, er, size.

Please, can we get some coverage of the really important issues?  Read more 

So much for the idea that the Conservapedia guys are anything but Republican operatives, eh? And so much for the “Neutral Point of View” that Wikipedia uses. I mean, did the Encyclopedia Brittanica endorse Margaret Thatcher?

But actually, I went to Conservapedia, inspired by Xan, to see what the conservative definition of vagina is. Here it is:  Read more 

Let’s look at some nuggets from Fred Thompson, the Man Who Would Be Reagan. (Hey, I’d say “Chicken McNuggets” from Fred Thompson, ’cause he’s yet another Republican chickenhawk, that wouldn’t show Civility, now would it? And give the guy credit: He’s a better actor than Reagan ever was, and he doesn’t try to pretend he’s a fighter pilot.)

Anyhow, I trolled through Thompson’s column on The Corner (archives, DCOW) and came up with a few gems:  Read more 

I guess it all makes sense. If you have your head totally up your butt. But the journamalists are already wet:

Politician-turned-actor Fred Thompson has been coy with audiences as he flirts with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

In an interview with USA TODAY, however, the former Tennessee senator not only makes it clear that he plans to run, he describes how he aims to do it. He’s planning an unconventional campaign using blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters repelled by politics-as-usual in both parties.

“I can’t remember exactly the point that I said, ’I’m going to do this,’ ” Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. “But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: ’I’m going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.’ ”

Not a dry seat in the house.

I know what my reaction is:  Read more 

Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? “Council for National Policy” is probably regretting inviting Fred Thompson to audition speak to them, because it’s attracting attention to their existence. They like this like Superman likes kryptonite.

Who is the “Council for National Policy”? Well, it was started by one Tim LaHaye—yeah, that “Left Behind” Tim LaHaye, who you thought just wrote Rapture porn, which btw made up about 80% of the “Books” section at WalMarts for quite a few years— way back in 1981 (per Wikipedia and numerous other sources. The membership consists of names like (again per wiki):

Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly, Robert Grant, Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with the Constitution Party, Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist, and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party and who, with Karl Rove, engineered the 2004 Republican election strategy.

If you’re looking for the dark slimy spider heart of everything we’re up against, this gang would be at least the right ventricle.  Read more