Apparently, Ol’ Freddie Thompson endorsed John McCain a few days ago, but nobody knew about it, not even CNN.

Could it be that Ol’ Freddie was just too lazy to appear on t.v. for like 10 seconds and say, “Shucks, folks, I sure do like John McCain. Golly, gosh and shucks.”?

I mean, a t.v. crew could have even just gone over to Ol’ Freddie’s ol’ house and filmed him for a couple of minutes talkin ’bout how, golly, John McCain sure would make a great prezdent.

Apparently Ol’ Freddie is even too lazy for that.

McCain/Thompson ‘08!

(Cross posted at The November Blog)

Fred Thompson, John McCain | 5 Comments »

Just like it’s impossible to boycott Iran, Burma, or Communist China, one ex-Fred Thompson staffer’s effort to boycott Chuck Norris seems doomed to failure:

I want you to join me in boycotting all of the products that Chuck Norris endorses and some of the national companies that run advertisements on the show in which he starred and currently rerunning on the USA cable network, Walker, Texas Ranger. I also ask that you tell these companies why you are boycotting them. (See list to the right with contact information and post below for a sample e-mail.)

Darrell Ng reasons that Norris is endorsing Mike Huckabee, who at one time favored rounding up people with AIDS, and doesn’t believe in evolution, and that deserves consumer oppobrium.

Ng targets Total Gym, Geico, and KFC. Oh, and Tylenol, which advertises during reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger on USA. Which is a shame because watching reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger to find out who actually advertises during the show would give me a headache.

He’d better hope Aleve and Advil don’t run commercials in that time slot, too.

Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee | No Comments »

You would think that because Fred Thompson left the race for president, the embarrassments that have hounded his hapless, walking corpse of a self for the past few months would cease, and he could go back to private life, safe in the knowledge that nothing could happen that we could make fun of him about.

But ha! You are mistaken. The Ol’ Freddie joke is coming out of retirement!

Check this:

A very special event happened for the Fred Thompson campaign on Tuesday — besides his official withdrawal from the race, of course. It turns out that after he withdrew via a press release that afternoon, he effectively won something that same night.

National Review reports that the winner of the Louisiana caucuses was an uncommitted slate running under the title of “Pro-Life, Pro-Family,” followed by John McCain, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. In fact, the organizers of that “Pro-Life, Pro-Family” slate were almost all Thompson supporters who decided to take that name a few weeks ago, when it became a distinct possibility that he would drop out before the caucuses — which he did that very afternoon.

If Thompson had still been in the race, a Louisiana political source explained to NR, his state delegate strength in Louisiana would have been enough to potentially get him all of the state’s 47 national delegates. The one big problem, though, is that he dropped out only hours before he finally won something.

So it took dropping out of the race to actually win something for Ol’ Freddie.

Seriously. Fred Thompson is the gift that keeps on giving. This guy is a non-stop comedy show. Somebody should make a slapstick movie about him. It would be hilarious.

Ah, but who would play Ol’ Freddie? Anybody know any third rate, walking corpse actors?

Ok. Ok. Besides Ol’ Freddie himself?

(Cross posted at The November Blog)

Fred Thompson | 2 Comments »

NBC News is reporting that Grandpa Fred is out of the race.

So ends the laziest candidacy in American history. They’re showing b-roll of Fred “campaigning” on MSNBC and they literally can’t find anything more interesting than him eating a bowl of soup.

Remember, this was the “conservative choice” beloved by the Internet right, the man who the Republicans saw as a savior when he first entered the campaign.

Hilarious.

Fred Thompson | 3 Comments »

I was in Nevada covering the Dems all weekend, so I kind of neglected the twists and turns of the Republican race. I’m not talking about fringe candidates like Rudy Giuliani (even his money men in New York are jumping ship), but the ones who actually still have a chance of winning the thing. And I think it’s coming down to a two-person race.

Rasmussen is showing Romney opening up a lead today. But he’s been up with ads, while McCain starts them today. So that’s subject to change as we get a week-plus of pretty intense campaigning down there, which will only be on the Republican side since the Democrats are forbidden from doing so as part of the state breaking DNC rules with their primary.

Romney or McCain will be the nominee. Huckabee’s loss in South Carolina, aided by Thompson going all-out there and taking away some of his votes, seems to me decisive. If he can’t win in a Southern Baptist state, after throwing every bit of dirt he could and associating homosexuality with bestiality and trying to make the frickin’ Confederate flag an issue, then there’s not much hope for him replicating the Iowa victory, where he was basically squeaky clean.

Florida is unique to all the states that have voted so far, in that it’s a) a closed primary and b) winner take all for delegates. I don’t think Romney has lost to McCain among Republicans in any state where he’s actually competed. And Giuliani, who will get some votes, probably hurts McCain, in the same way that Thompson hurt Huckabee.

Romney would, obviously, be a great general election candidate for Democrats to face, simply by virtue of the fact that the media hates him so, and that he’s been so successfully defined as a flip-flopper. But electability aside, I think he has a shot in Florida because the top issue in these primaries is starting to be the economy, and even though Romney actually does better among brainwashed Republicans who think the economy is doing great, at least he has an argument to make that he knows what he’s talking about. McCain actually doesn’t have a clue. After admitting that he doesn’t know much about the economy at all, he’s tried to catch up and take on these conservative ideas which are ill-fitting to him.

John McCain recently acknowledged, “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.” He added, however, “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”

I’m quite certain The Maestro isn’t helping. In South Carolina, McCain told an audience a couple of days ago, “Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues.” As a matter of reality, McCain was talking gibberish.

A few days prior, at a Republican debate, McCain said, “I don’t believe we’re headed into a recession. I believe the fundamentals of this economy are strong and I believe they will remain strong.”

Now, McCain, who presumably would have learned something about economics after serving in Congress for the last quarter-century, blamed government spending for creating an economic decline that he didn’t believe existed less than a week ago.

Government spending simply isn’t a factor for a destroyed subprime mortgage market, the credit crunch, and sluggish consumer spending. He literally has no idea what he’s talking about; the same with saying that tax raises cut revenues, which is from the planet Not True. I know the media covers for McCain as much as they cover for Brett Favre, but seriously, this is going to seep out.

But we shall see. Patrick Ruffini, a conservative, has an excellent roundup of the race. A quote:

Mitt Romney is fast becoming the candidate of conservatives in the suburbs and the exurbs. In Michigan, he dominated Oakland and Macomb counties with 46% of the vote in a multi-candidate field. In Nevada, he won most convincingly in Clark County. In Iowa, he did better in Des Moines than elsewhere in the state.

The Romney and McCain coalitions also overlap. They represent two different sides of the establishment coin, with McCain representing an older, mainline establishment — the Republican Party of Gerry Ford, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole — and Romney representing the brasher, post-Reagan establishment that was built on the tax issue and whose alliance with modern-day Huckabee voters allowed them to take control of the party in 1994 [...]

The trouble for McCain is although he has probably secured the moderate berth in the finals (sorry, Rudy), he hasn’t made many inroads with the base and his vote still looks decidedly unlike what that of a GOP nominee should look like. To say that conservative South Carolinians somehow embraced McCain is to ignore the fact that McCain lost conservatives, pro-lifers, and Evangelicals, and eeked it out against the most divided field to date.

With Romney’s suburban base secure, for McCain to start racking up victory margins in the 40s — which he’ll need as candidates fade or drop out — he’d need to add votes from the Christian conservative base — from supporters of walking wounded like Huck and Fred. Because of their candidates’ personal animosities towards Romney, that is a distinct possibility that such an alliance could be forged — but it would be an alliance of opposites — of pro-life and pro-choice, of liberal and conservative, of secular and evangelical. I don’t know if conservatives are going to overlook that fact.

In the traditional middle of this fight is Mitt Romney, who strives to represent a sort of Goldilocks conservatism. The question is if center is big enough to hold this year.

I think it’s really anybody’s guess. I wouldn’t be surprised with Romney or McCain as the nominee.

Fred Thompson, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani | No Comments »

Unca Fred Thompson not only has no interest in being President, he has no interest in politics or the economy.

Republican White House hopeful Fred Thompson made light of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s call for a quick economic stimulus Thursday and said it might be best to leave the economy alone for now.

Thompson was answering questions in a restaurant where Bernanke could be seen on a TV urging short-term relief to avert a recession. Thompson was asked what he would do.

“You could probably get a ‘Law & Order’ rerun on TNT there if you wanted to switch that around a little bit,” quipped Thompson, who acted on the series. When the host reminded him Bernanke is a South Carolina native, Thompson joked: “That looks a little boring to me. I don’t care.”

That’s your clear conservative choice in action.

By the way, Freddie’s come out against the global AIDS initiative.

At a campaign stop attended by a CBS reporter in Lady’s Island, S.C., Thompson was asked if he, “as a Christian, as a conservative,” supported President Bush’s global AIDS initiative. “Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson responded. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”

Thompson went on: “I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that. With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you — we’ve got a lot of problems here. . . . “

I think the only war Thompson’s going to be fighting is the war on narcolepsy.

Fred Thompson | 2 Comments »

…as if.

Have a look at the results from New Hampshire last night. The Great Reagan-like Hope was decisively in seventh place in New Hampshre.  In fact, “Total Write-Ins” got 1,300 votes more than the wise-cracking actor who once played a senator on C-SPAN2.

That means instead of voting for Fred Thompson, more of New Hampshire’s discerning primary voters were interested in writing in some random candidate for president like Tinky Winky, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, or perhaps even Democratic candidates selected by Republican voters who didn’t want to change their registration.

Just you wait for South Carolina. It’s all going to turn around in South Carolina his people insist. But if you look in the latest polls, he’s not even registering.

So please please please help Fred fill up the red truck.

Seriously, isn’t it a little scary that his campaign would think it’s a good idea to even engage in visual metaphors that hint that the vessel of the campaign is running out of gas? When you look at the latest fundraising appeal, it appears that Thompson is working out of his home, maybe because paying the rent on a campaign office can’t compete with rising gas prices, and he’s going to have to do a lot of driving around the Palmetto State if he’s going to be able to convince the state’s voters to choose him over Total Write-Ins.

Fred Thompson, New Hampshire, South Carolina | 2 Comments »

Josh Marshall wonders if Romney might have regained a touch of momentum just before the polls open. Either way, he suggests that, when you consider the bigger picture, it would be more than premature to suppose that a victory in New Hampshire would vault John McCain to the nomination:

The next big fight is in South Carolina. And two new polls out today (Rasmussen and SurveyUSA) show Huckabee in a dominant position in the state. So Huckabee looks likely to take Secessionville with either McCain or Romney coming in second.

At that point you’ll have to say that Huckabee, who the GOP establishment is roundly against, is the frontrunner in the campaign. And the others are going to coalesce around an anti-Huckabee candidate. It’s not clear to me that McCain is a shoe-in for that role.

McCain is, for the most part, just another right-wing Republican. But his tentative heresies on issues like campaign finance, global warming, and immigration are still a problem in his relationship with the GOP establishment. That establishment, while hardly united behind any single candidate, has generally expressed a good deal more interest in candidates like Romney, Giuliani, and even Fred Thompson. There may be voter movement behind McCain right now – but the whole point of being an establishment is that you don’t want the voters to ruin everything by deciding these things for themselves.

It may or may not be in the GOP establishment’s power to make the decision, at this late date, as to who will be the anti-Huckabee. But they’ll try, and there’s no particular reason to believe that they’ll try to make it McCain.

Fred Thompson, John McCain, Michael Bloomberg, Mitt Romney, New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani, South Carolina | No Comments »

(First of all, it’s a pleasure and an honor to join The Right’s Field, as it has long been one of my favorite blogs. Second of all, I’m actually quite sad that the Iowa caucuses are tomorrow, because that means that the candidate who we can all count on to serve up the comic gold day after day, Ol’ Freddie Thompson, will soon be just a faded, old memory, and not just a faded, old person. So tonight, in honor of Ol’ Freddie, I would like to make fun of him one last time. Er, um, does “second” or “third to last time” have the same ring to it?)

(Cross posted at The November Blog)

With just two days to go until the Iowa caucuses, you would think that Ol’ Freddie Thompson would have spent yesterday running (ha!) around Iowa, trying desperately to find a way to secure at least a somewhat respectable showing in Thursday’s caucus.

Just 48 hours left before what will certainly be a make or break event for Ol’ Freddie’s ol’ campaign. So, how many events do you think he attended on his whirlwind Iowa tour yesterday?

20? 15? 10? (I know one usually counts upwards when trying to get people to guess a certain number, but come on, we can’t actually raise expectations!)

Maybe 5?

Nope. 1. And it was hilarious, though not in the way Ol’ Freddie intended.

Thompson dismissed Monday’s poll results as, ”Just another poll,” after talking to residents of the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown. Thompson pointed out that while the Des Moines Register Iowa Poll had him in fourth, a CNN poll released Tuesday showed him in third.”I have a very special, secret strategy” for the last two days before Thursday’s caucuses, he joked.

“It’s called staying on the bus and meeting people one on one,” he said.

The visit to the 750-bed facility was Thompson’s only event of the day.

Ha! But wait, it gets better.

He said he took a nap Tuesday then quickly added that he was joking when no one in the press corps covering him laughed.

The most hilarious part here of course is that the article fails to mention if the reporters actually did laugh once Ol’ Freddie explained that in fact he had been joking.

UPDATE by David Dayen: And Noah appears to be prescient, as Thompson, perhaps just grumpy because he didn’t get his green Jello today, has reached the end of the line.

Several Republican officials close to Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign said they expect the candidate will drop out of the race within days if he finishes poorly in Thursday’s Iowa caucus.

Thompson’s campaign, which last spring and summer was generating fevered anticipation in the media and with some Republican activists, has never ignited nationally, and there are no signs of a late spark happening here in Iowa, where even a third-place finish is far from assured [...]

“Without a solid third-place finish, there’s no point in going on,” a Thompson adviser said Wednesday. “It was an honorable race, and he turned out to be a good candidate. The moment had just passed.”

No word on whether or not the advisor was referring to a Maalox moment.

By the way, it’s expected that Thompson would throw his support to John McCain, inducing this cringe-worthy line:

In turn, Thompson might be named attorney general in a McCain administration.

For those of you who thought Alberto Gonzales was in over his head…

Fred Thompson | 3 Comments »

Fox News is afraid of Ron Paul, keeping him out of their next debate. It used to be that a station like this would love to have Paul on as a whipping boy. But since their pathetic set of candidates are so weak, Paul looks like a giant among Lilliputians. Odd that Paul doesn’t make the debate stage, but the guy who this week said he’s not particularly interested in running for President does, huh?

Fred Thompson, Ron Paul | 2 Comments »