Thursday, October 04, 2007

Starting to like the guy

Up to now, I've only been hoping to like Fred Thompson.

But here comes the NYTimes, in a clever little sneer of a story, saying Fred's a walking corpse.

May be. But I read it a bit differently: He thinks campaigning is bullshit. The good news is, that's the kind of guy we need. The bad news is, it makes me think of the last, and maybe only, genuine moment from George H.W. Bush, looking at his watch at the first of those ridiculous Oprah debates that have now become standard. (You know the one; it's when Mr. Ponytail said, "Think of us as your children . . ." and Bush, instead of saying, "If you were my child, I'd kill you, your mother, your grandparents, all my brothers and sisters and all your cousins and then myself to make sure it never happened again," actually mumbled an idiot non-answer to the question.

God, he deserved to lose. But look what it did to the country's politics.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What did it do to the country's politics?

4:17 AM, October 04, 2007  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Do you think a well-run GHWB campaign really would have changed anything? The pendulum swings, regardless. The loser in 92 would have honed in new effective campaign tactics to win the next election- just like it always happens.

There still ain't a dime's worth of difference between the parties

5:17 AM, October 04, 2007  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I greatly regret that Jack Kemp did not get the nomination over George Sr. back in 1988. George Bush Sr. was a nice enough guy (probably too nice) and it was his "turn" to get the nomination under the genteel unwritten rules of the GOP, but what a mistake. The party has been suffering from his mistakes in office ever since. And I think his mistakes largely came from his not being a true adherent to the philosophy and policies of the reagan right (what he called voo doo economics, among other things).

I wonder whether a Jack Kemp would have left Saddam in power at the end of the Gulf War. He would not have undermined the Republican's argument for lowering marginal tax rates. And, of course, he moght not have lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.

11:32 AM, October 04, 2007  

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