Fred Thompson: "I'm, Well...Announcing My Candidacy's Announcement"

There are plenty of reasons to dismiss Fred Thompson's run for the Repuglican Nomination for the Presidency. He's a failed lawyer who claims to have brought down the Nixon Administration (Nixon's comment on learning the young Fred would be handling part of the Watergate hearings: "But he's the dumbest son of a bitch alive!" Erlichmann: "It looks like we're stuck with him, sir."), a lounge-lizard lobbyist, an outstandingly mediocre Senator, and a one-note actor valued for his ability to emote blithe superiority and hawkishly cynical ambivalence. As an added bonus, his face looks like it got caught in the tracks of a Caterpillar at a garbage dump. You can probably see where I'm heading with this:

He's the perfect Republican candidate.

Mitt Romney may be born to wear a dark suit, and Giuliani may assuage the latent longing for Mussolini that lurks in us all, but did either of them appear on Law & Order (I mean for more than 5 minutes) or star as the Navy Admiral in Crimson Tide and about 20 other Cold-War-paranoia movies? I don't think so. Although he has no religion to speak of, Fred makes the fundies feel all warm inside every time he trails off with a "Well..." Nobody else on The Trail can do that. No one can call him a pretty boy. He has no voting record to speak of. He's pure image, false as a storefront in a 50's Western.

But can a shiftless, anti-intellectual idiot beat a "cold, calculating" latter-day Lucretia Borgia? Could the same idiot win against a "naive" (black) man? Maybe he won't run?