Headless Thompson gunner

Fred Thompson, vacuous stentorian, deliberately and stupidly mistakes a statistical fact mentioned by Harry Reid for an inevitable cause:

In a posting on Twitter, Thompson wrote, "Reid: Jobless men = domestic abuse. Is he saying we should be worried about Mrs. Reid after the November elections?"

Republicans never let honesty get in the way of using bullshit to imitate a joke. Playing ignoramus is what they do.

Oh, and look, here he is using a teleprompter:


Probably making a gibe at President Obama for using a teleprompter...

The L word

When Betsy McCaughey tells Fred Thompson

that mandatory counseling sessions with Medicare beneficiaries would "tell them how to end their life sooner" and would teach the elderly how to "decline nutrition . . . and cut your life short." [emphasis added]

Ceci Connolly knows McCaughey's lying, but Connolly will never stoop to baldly stating that truth to her readers.

How do I know Connolly knows? Paragraph 2:

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary. [emphasis added]

Connolly prefers reporting the controversy to reporting the truth. She has a long disreputable history of doing this. It allows her to put the conservative propaganda into play without taking responsibility for it.

Why is Fred Thompson spamming me?

Fred, I'm not interested, never have been. I know you need something to keep you busy in your retirement. Did you ever consider needlepoint? Star of MP3 - isn't that quite a comedown?

I'm going to try the unsubscribe link, see if that gets yet another yammerhead out of my inbox.

Acting like adults about adultery

Mark Sanford, politically, has made news for some truly great silliness. All his posturing about whether he would accept federal stimulus funding cravenly played to all that's most misanthropic and uneducable in the Republican base. It did get him a lot of national attention from a media that is dying to anoint the next conservative saint.

Now, of course, Sanford is making tremendous gobbets of tabloid news for his disappearance into a love affair. The only reason any of that matters should be the disappearance, not the affair. He did fail to discharge his duties for a week, but lots of people cheat, and we really cannot afford to have all of them resign their positions of responsibility, even if they've been exposed as arrant hypocrites. (Hey, they're Republicans. Hey, they're politicians.)

Fred Thompson, with his own checkered romantic past, belabors Sanford in the great mosh pit of American sexual politics:

I don’t have any sympathy in a situation where you’ve got a wife and four fairly young kids . . . don’t play it out in public.

Lots of others are shocked, shocked that Sanford would betray his wife. More than anything, they're shocked that he would betray them - or, if Democrats, shocked and delighted at the opportunity to kill off a rival. For the Republicans, it still mostly seems to be about the sex:

One county GOP leader said the governor “talked about how our leaders have stepped away from our core values, and said one thing on the campaign trail or out in the public and did something different in the background.’’

As time passes, we will again find out that some of those calling loudest for Sanford's resignation are even now conducting their own affairs. We could do without this hypocrisy by letting even politicians have a private life with - or, in this case, possibly without - their families.

Update (6/28): I've been corrected on this with a reminder that Sanford himself campaigned on family values, which makes the GOP leader quoted above correct. There does have to be accountability for hypocrisy on all sides.

'Cause Fred said

Why can Fred Thompson still get on TV? He's a snoozer. He's less popular than Dennis Kucinich, and you don't see him turning up on your screen. Is Kucinich's jaw wired shut or something?

I've got it. Fred is soooo gorgeous. That must be it.

What he says makes no sense either:

"If he takes us down the road of tripling our national debt in ten years and making us vulnerable to higher interest rates and higher inflation, and things of that nature, I want all those policies not to succeed," he said.

Somehow CNN's John Roberts is not prepared to ask Reaganite Fred to compare Obama's plan to what Reagan and Bush did in their 12 years - multiply the national debt by a factor of four and a half! Saint Ronnie tripled it on his own.

Update: In the liquor store, there's Fred again, cover boy of "Cigar Aficionado" magazine. Run, Fred, run! I guess Jeri hasn't had enough of the spotlight.

GOP standings to date - the pretenders

Eliminate all the options that are impossible and whatever is left, however unlikely, will happen.

Starting with the pretenders:

• Duncan Hunter, who he? He has a delegate because he is a delegate. Shift a few bellwether brain cells, and he could be tied with Rudy Giuliani
• Rudi, ah, Rudi, it's not that we hardly knew ye. It's just that you are too obviously a mean, authoritarian SOB. And to the Republican base, those are your good qualities. I never thought a repeat cross-dresser could win in the Republican Party; his poll numbers were a media creation doomed to die embarrassingly. Except that nothing embarrasses Rudi, not even all that icky personal stuff.
• Fred Thompson was the guy you date, not the guy you marry. Seriously, does that show how gag-a-maggot the Republican Party is, or what? Fred jumped the shark (I am so glad I finally learned what that means) before he even jumped into the race. He wanted the Presidency as a retirement gift, and even the Grand Old Party is not that senescent.

Ron Paul needs a category all to himself. He has managed to attract all the scruffy Objectivists who think they're the second coming of John Galt, whoever he was (the man ain't got no culture), and evidently some of them know how to charge a credit card on the Internet. He's right about Iraq for all the wrong isolationist reasons, and the rest of his platform would have been neandercon in the 19th century, which is where he evidently found a wormhole from which to emerge into contemporary Texas daylight. Good thing, too - in any other state except maybe Louisiana, more people would laugh at him than vote for him. OK, maybe Idaho, too.

More to come...

What Iowa means - Republicans

Even less than it means to the Democrats...

Huckabee blunted Mitt Romney's early money-buys-name-recognition strategy. Mitt won't be running the table.

Huckabee, though, is still a big question mark. Ed Rollins only thinks he helped.

Mitt Romney still has money. I expect to see ads leaking over the border that tag Huckabee as an opportunist.

The three old fossils are still as viable as they were before. For Fred Thompson, it's probably a disappointment that he did too well to fade out of the race.

Duncan Hunter is still hopeless. He's probably crying that everyone stole his issue, but that's his face-saver for quitting.

The year of Huckabee

Will 2008 by Mike Huckabee's year, or is he about to jump the shark? As long as he doesn't last past November 4, I don't really care.

The fact that Huckabee is even in the race testifies to the weakness of the field and the dissatisfaction that even the core constituencies of the Republican feel toward them. Romney would be perfect if he hadn't insincerely moved left for Massachusetts. Giuliani would be perfect if he hadn't been seen so often in a dress - being an asshole is no hindrance. Thompson would be perfect if he could stay awake.

So, Huckabee has an opening, and only the usual owners of the GOP object.

Huckabee is a crazy man, however. He's a wild Christian and evolution-denier. He touts a middle-class-killing federal sales tax of 30% or more, letting the really rich off the hook entirely. He thinks Iraq is an "ideological war on terror".

More Sunday comics blogging

The problem with trying to handicap the Republican field is that they're all so handicapped already. For example, before Fred Thompson dithered away his buzz, I thought he would be the perfect empty vessel into which Republicans could pour their shake 'n' bake cult of personality. He could play another vacuous character on the national stage and quench the silly wingnut thirst for another Ronald Reagan.

But, no, he couldn't even remember his best line from The Hunt for Red October, "Your average Russkie, son, don't take a dump without a plan." Turned out even Jeri didn't have much of a plan to prop up her man without his unmistakable lassitude showing through.

So, the national press corps is back to searching for the dark horse who has the legs to pass Romney and Giuliani. This week it's Huckabee, which really shows how far the lunacy has spread.

Who can unite the plutocrats, the authoritarians, and the theocons? Draft Dick Cheney!

Candidates and cancer

Two Republican candidates have cancer. The spouse of one Democratic candidate has cancer. Which has gotten the most pundit and press attention?

Elizabeth Edwards's recurrence of cancer was conventionally supposed to spell the end of her husband's candidacy, but the Edwardses decided to live the rest of her life to the fullest and hopefully for years, rather than settling down to wait for her to die.

Fred Thompson has non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but the press has basically said ho-hum. I happened to channel-surf past "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" last night, and the contrast between his appearance there - playing himself only with better lines - and his skeletal appearance now was a hell of a lot more than better make-up.

Rudy spent the night in the hospital with those ubiquitous "flu-like symptoms". His spokeswoman said afterward (my emphasis):

After precautionary tests the doctors found nothing of concern at this time...

Will the press herd question this? My bet: nope.

Update: I had forgotten (blame the media for not reminding me incessantly) that John McCain had enough skin cancer on the left side of his face that Joan Rivers would have been jealous of the opportunity to pull the jowls back in.

IOKIYAR

Flying around with a former drug dealer is the best thing to happen to Fred Thompson lately. At least it keeps his moribund campaign in the news and gives him a chance to spin some homespun platitudes. This guy has obviously turned his life around - he's a Republican!

Fred could use a stimulant, though, and this guy sold marijuana. Funny he never did any time for it even after a probation violation.

Nowadays, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people serving mandatory minimum sentences in prison for similar crimes, thanks to Republicans and Democrats trying to out-tough each other. I notice no one asked Fred if he would pardon them. To spin it a Republican way: It would save the country a hell of a lot of money.

Heart of snarkness

Howie Kurtz perfectly represents the disastrous irresponsibility of political journalism:

[J]ournalists are examining her personality quirks precisely because she is doing so well, and because it's more fun than analyzing her health plan. [emphasis added]

As if the world exists for his amusement, he goes on to fill pages and pages with slams directed at Hillary Clinton's laugh, with a brief slap at Barack Obama's ears. (Somehow, Fred Thompson's wattles missed the cut, as did the actually relevant scariness of Rudy Giuliani's eyes, because, y'know, it's o.k. to look funny if you're a Republican.)

Kurtz has the obscene unmitigated gall to call his column "Chucklegate", probably congratulating himself on the subtle irony of further debasing the already hackneyed -gate suffix. What a hack!

And to justify his focus on the inconsequential, he hides behind Jon Stewart, who is doing comedy! I would fire the whole useless lot of mainstream pundits. They are too lazy, stupid, and vapid to be paid a single shrinking dollar for reinforcing each other's witless 7th grade (slow track) narratives.

Kurtz follows Stewart "because he's got a small army of kids poring over the TiVo for ridicule-worthy sound bites." Ridicule! That's what he thinks his job is. Why does he still have it?

Oxymoron - Presidential Republican

It's hard to imagine that any of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates could possibly close the deal with the voters. Still, one of these cavemen has to win, and after all Duhbya managed. To America's eternal shame, twice.

The Republican frontrunners have serious problems. (Note to Democrats: Start exploiting them now, before the media sets its narrative in permanent ink.) And it's not just that most of them can't keep their flies zipped.

Rudy Giuliani has insinuated his America's Mayor branding into the media narrative, but his real appeal is visceral. Rudy is America's Augusto Pinochet. He is offering to save America from the brown people as long as we don't look too closely at how he does it. This is obviously his appeal to the anti-democratic reactionaries known as strong Republicans. I still don't think even Rudi's faux tough enough to look macho in a dress, and I expect Romney to put cross-dressing fashion ads in heavy rotation if he needs to. If Romney doesn't, those of us on the left need to.

Mitt Romney is slippery, a completely shameless and craven opportunist, which is why he'll nudge-nudge-wink-wink some 529 to go after Rudi. From what he says in public, you can tell his only core conviction is me, me, me. In the primary season, he's one step away from executing women who have abortions. Should he win the nomination, he'll try to average his pro-choice positions from Massachusetts with his current positions. He believes in the power of false advertising to do this. If he were not Mormon, he'd be the frontrunner.

Fred Thompson is everything wrong with Washington - and I don't mean the May-December sex. He's a vacuous media creation who has been double-dealing his entire career, starting with leaking Watergate Select Committee investigative direction to the Nixon White House. While he seems like the perfect Republican candidate - lazy but can hit his marks and deliver a line with that great voice - he missed his window of opportunity. The summer stock Hamlet role bored us with too many rehearsals. And, by the way, his health is not off the table; he has non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which killed Paul Tsongas. Does Huckleberry Fred, as Roger Ailes calls him, really have the indolent form (slow, incurable - sounds like a Republican)?

John McCain used to be the list. He kissed so much Bush ass, though, that even his vaunted appeal to moderates (mostly because they haven't paid attention) has a carbuncle on it. If I were attacking McCain, I'd go right after his undeserved reputation as a straight shooter.

Mike Huckabee is trying to get enough oxygen to be the dark horse. The press is playing along because the field is otherwise so lame.

All the other guys and Huckabee, too, are running for some other office than President. VP? Long shots don't win Republican Presidential nominations.

Maybe they're just pimping their favorite issues. Tancredo is running for president of the militia movement, but he's neck and neck with Hunter. Brownback is probably trying to abort Rudi. Ron Paul strokes the GOP pretense of libertarianism. Maybe they're all just there for the nasty puns I could make on their names.

Or maybe they just needed to get out on the road for a little campaign sex.

Day late, dollar short

You know you've jumped the shark when you finally announce your deep-voiced campaign for the presidency (since that voice is all you've really got), and the death of a tenor bumps you off the front page of CNN.com. My prediction: Fred'll be desperate for his old pick-up truck soon. Hopefully, he'll be lobbying for his old job back soon after that.

Did IQs just drop while I was away?

The AP reporter who filed this Fred Thompson puff piece should be fired. Not tomorrow. Not after breakfast. Now. The editor who didn't refile it into the trash should be canned, too.

The AP knows that the faded red pickup is bullshit, that it's just a campaign prop, that it is only marketing not related to reality, like the Iraq war. But that doesn't matter. The AP wants to print bullshit. There's just no other plausible explanation.

The weird thing is that Thompson has political advisers who apparently want to bring the truck back for 2008. Or maybe they just want to get stupid stories like this printed, since we all know that the voters are too stupid to respond to anything more hifalutin' than pork rinds, aw shucks, Ah cain't tawk too good bullshit.

Here's another load of yummy BS. Ah, Tennessee voters - and I used to be one - must be credulous idiots. Not only that, Tom Humphrey thinks they're proud that they're stupid, and he's happy to play to it any time. Some are, maybe many.

Getting back to the science fiction theme of the headline, I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Or maybe we're all just lost in the Sinai, though I don't think that's the promised land up ahead, 'cause Moses sure as hell ain't leading this particular double-wide handbasket.

Run, Fred, run

Every time something political happens, CNN quotes undeclared candidate Fred Thompson's reaction to it. With this kind of free press, why would he ever declare his candidacy?

The national media is just as corrupt as the politicians they're in bed with, sometimes literally.

Justice

On KnoxViews:

McCain swallowed his pride and kissed tons of Duhbya and wingnut ass. This is the thanks he gets, the just desserts of the way he put ambition before honor. Now he gets to live with his regrets.

Rudy the authoritarian gets it next. At some point, someone is going to make a commercial using all the stills and videos of Giuliani in a dress.

After that, it's either Fred or Mitt. Either one will say anything to get elected, so they're perfect Republicans.