Make-Believe Reagan I can say exactly when I first knew that Fred Dalton Thompson is dangerous... "Did he just say . . . ?" "Yeah," the guy says, dumbfounded. "He just said being president isn't that hard." I'm still trying to process this when I spot Carl Cameron, the right-wing hatchet man for Fox News. Cameron is whaling on Thompson, doing a mocking impersonation of the candidate's "Security, Unity, Prosperity" campaign shtick. "We're, uh, gonna be yoo-nited bah owre yoo-nity!" Cameron cracks. A crowd of reporters doubles over in laughter. Then they get in their vehicles and chase after Thompson to the next event, so they can feverishly record those same hackneyed lines again and again for posterity. They'll laugh in private, but they'll be repeating that shit on air with a straight face for the next 400 days. Well, I think as I stand by myself on the curb, so much for Fred Thompson. After all, logic dictates that anyone who's too much of a lightweight for Fox News is probably... I freeze. Probably what? Probably a shoo-in for the presidency, that's what! I shudder as I realize my mistake, and suddenly the candidacy of Fred Thompson, which seemed impossibly silly just a few minutes ago, makes deadly serious sense. Thompson may act like a blank slate -- a homespun version of Being There hero Chauncey Gardiner running on a platform of "Whatever you say" and "I'll get back to you on that" -- but he represents something else that no one, after seven years of George W. Bush, could possibly have expected: a new low. It was bad enough when the GOP field was led by a grinning Mormon corporatist and a fascist ex-mayor itching to take his prostate pain out on the world, but Thompson is the worst yet -- a human snooze button, campaigning baldly for the head-in-the-sand vote by asking Americans not to think but to change the channel... What Thompson inspires is something much more appropriate for Americans of the TV age: He gets audiences purring in a cozy stupor. Their eyes glaze over and they end up looking like a bunch of flies happily lapping up their own puke... ...What Thompson is selling is escapism, pure and simple. He's selling America not as a vast adventure epic but as a timid, forty-seven-minute made-for-cable movie about a folksy small-town dad -- a fantasy that makes no sense at all in the context of a massive militarized oligarchy currently occupying half the world's deserts on borrowed money. The people who are buying this fantasy are buying out of fear, because they can't bear to look anymore. They've simply given up trying to deal. If Thompson wins -- and he very well might -- that's what it'll be: total surrender. The lowest we've ever sunk. -From Rolling Stone
People who can watch Fred Thompson at one of these debates and think - "Yeah I should really vote for the dumb Zombie" ... I'm just beyond words for such folks. How could someone come to such a decision? Why on earth would anyone think this guy is a reasonable candidate to vote for?
I haven't seen him in the debates, but I saw him on Jay Leno and thought he was actually pretty cool. He came off as a type of person that says what he thinks.
It's possible that he's the type of person who says what he thinks (although I am not convinced) but if that is the case he doesn't think a whole lot. As Richard Nixon said, Fred Thompson is dumb as hell.