Reaganesque: Fred Thompson Is Already Senile
The GOP primary's great white hope, Hollywood Fred Thompson, is either purposefully trying to derail his campaign before Halloween so he can lazily enjoy the winter holidays, or he's so Reaganesque that he's going senile before the election. Nothing else could explain his bizarre tone-deaf response to questions about the southern conservative primary voter's own personal version of the Crucifixion story: the tragic removal of Terry Schiavo's feeding tube two years ago.
Here's what he said in a televised Florida interview:
"I can't pass judgment on it. I know that good people were doing what they thought was best," Thompson said. "That's going back in history. I don't remember the details of it."
He doesn't remember the most ghoulish clown show since the impeachment of Bill Clinton? Really, Fred? You know, that Terry Schiavo "culture of life" bullshit festival that had Bush Junior actually interrupting his biweekly month off in Texas and flying back to Washington to sign some ridiculous unconstitutional law that utterly failed when his own Supreme Court threw it out?
Of course, Thompson could be avoiding the embarrassing issue in an especially clumsy, stupid way -- it was the last great DeLay/Frist-era gamble, and it failed miserably. While riling up the wingnut base a full 18 months too early for the disastrous (for the GOP) 2006 election, it seemed to wake a lot of American Voters from the terror trance. "Oh shit," moderate voters collectively thought, "These people running the White House and Congress are scary lunatics. We'd be better off under Saddam."
Everybody (except the South Park guys) felt very bad about the poor braindead woman at the unconscious center of the whole weird melodrama, but everybody also decided they didn't want snake-handlers like Bill Frist making any decisions about their own inevitable "persistent vegetative states."
Anyway, Thompson is continuing his trend of alienating the mouth-breathers he needs to win primaries while saying common-sense things that might possibly appeal to independent voters in the general election long after he's out of the race.
In this latest interview, Thompson said Congress should stay out of such matters, adding that Bush Junior's Soviet-style public education program is a dismal failure.
Thompson Gives No Opinion on Schiavo [AP/HuffPo]