Fred Thompson, RIP

This post by Glenn Greenwald ought to be game set and match for Fred Thompson's nascent campaign. It perfectly highlights the craving of the right for a strong authoritarian executive, even if that authoritarianism stretches into Rudy's penchant for snappish petulance, or even to the Bush administrations radical theory of the unitary executive, a blatant misreading of both our Constitution as well as the history of executive power in our history.

Thompson is an actor and a fraud. He plays tough guys and dresses up in costumes like Bush does. To egomaniacs like Bush and Thompson, the play is the thing. We've been down that dangerous road for the past 6 years, and it has led us down a spider hole that may take us decades to escape. The right's penchant for this sort of faux toughness is summed up by Greenwald here:

This is what Thompson said last month when interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News:

WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?

THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing.

Outisde of the dwindling band of dead-ender neocons and other assorted Bush followers, the only people who mistake that sort of mindset -- " I would do essentially what the president's doing" -- with "toughness" are Beltway pundits who continue to promote the view that the more wars one urges, the more militarism one embraces, the "tougher" one is. Conversely, the more one wants to avert sending fellow citizens into war, the "weaker" or "softer" one is, or -- to use Fineman's post-debate formulation -- the less "masculine" one is.

[Greenwald also focuses on the improbability that Thompson fits into the type of social conservative profile that the Republican party holds so dear, but I'm uninterested in that farce. The Republican party will swallow hard and accept a twice divorced Rudy, a Hollywood skirt chaser like Thompson, or a twice divorced scandal plagued Gingrich in a moment, if they think that either Hillary or Barak are the alternative]


There is an incredible level of hubris that men like Cheney, Bush, Perle, and Limbaugh possess. They refused to serve, but feel comfortable sending soldiers off to die for a cause that they must know is already lost. Thompson has proved himself to be another of these.

UPDATE: Boy, if Greenwald's wasn't enough, here is Digby ripping Thompson for his shameless support of Libby, and by extension, the entire BushCo organization. This paragraph, while unflinchingly accurate, is depressing, considering that for the next eighteen months we'll see this over and over again.

I guess we should be grateful they didn't just hire Kiefer Sutherland to play Jack Bauer as president and get it over with. But it's just a matter of time. They can't win on the merits so they have to turn every election into a phony campaign pageant filled with special effects and costumes so hiring actors to play politicians really makes sense. Don't understimate their abilities --- they are master showmen. After all, they were able to convince an awful lot of people that Junior was a hero instead of the nasty little socialite in a cowboy suit he really is. If it takes hypocritically assassinating the characters of honest prosecutors while defending cheap political smear artists to do it, they have no problem with that. It's all part of the show.