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You'd think that Fred Thompson, after having seen Bill Clinton finally define a role for the cigar in presidential politics, would keep his in his suit coat pocket.
On a more serious note, all the talk of Thompson sharing Bush's cultural values raises the question:
Is Karl Rove's calculation, that "religious" and "cultural" conservatives are the future of the Republican Party, accurate? I get the feeling that, in the long run, Karl has sliced the pie to thin, and that appealing only to "cultural conservatives" won't win national elections anymore. The pundits and party leaders can say that Americans love Bush's hyper-aggressive military policies all they want, but the polls show that not to be the case.
We can expect Rovian tactics from Thompson's campaign if Rove's protege, Tim Griffin, who was slated to replace the Arkansas USA (until the DOJ scandals broke open), ends up in a top job with the campaign
As long as a "social conservative" candidate can give up an appropriate image, their actions are clearly less important.
Tom Delay acts like a social conservative, therefore, his indictment on money laundering doesn't matter. I. Lewis Libby acts like a social conservative, therefore, his conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice doesn't matter. George W. Bush lands in a jet on an aircraft carrier, therefore, his checkered history as a member of the Texas Air National Guard doesn't matter.
The image is what matters.
It seems to me that there is a strange and powerful synergy between (especially fundamentalist/evangelical) Christianity and this sort of hypocrisy. Becasue Christianity is a religion of faith, your salvation does not show in your deeds in the same way it does in Judaism or Islam.
Despite all the warnings against such things in the Gospels and Paul's letters, the fact that "we are all sinful" combined with the fact that "salvation comes only through the attestation of faith" is a recipe for invoking the Lord loudly while doing whatever one pleases.
Thompson was diagnosed with lymphoma a couple of years ago, but at present his cancer is "in remission". Why the media isn't exploring the ramifications of this fact instead of making fools of themselves over Thompson's carefully cultivated "tough guy" persona is an interesting question.
On Thompson's Bride:
Have you seen his new wife? More importantly, can you imagine her (barely 30-yrs-old?) as a First Lady?
The newer/younger model bride also ties into the hyper-masculinity and over-compensation that are part and parcel of being a "real man" in the "modern" GOP. Wow, look at the candy on his arm!
Christian conservatives talk about the sanctity of marriage and following the tenets of the Bible in our personal life. But they reject the Clintons because they have had a marriage that has required toughness, and love people that quit on the first marriage. The age of his bride is important, because it speaks to the rejection of his first wife for a younger woman.
Fred Thompson will be pandering exactly to what "some" modern conservitives want, the Big Daddy image. The whole idea is to have Pa fix everthing. If the patriarch handles business everyone else can go back out and play.
This is also why Thompson and other actual and potential Republican presidential candidates (Ron Paul excepted) try to outdo each other in projecting an image of stern, patriarchal strength that's more than adequate to protect America from its enemies, foreign and domestic.
And this is why the authority-worshipping adolescents in the media and elsewhere swoon in admiration of the patriarchal posturing of people like Romney, Giuliani and Thompson and their ilk.
Fred Thompson character is the perfect candidate for the Republicans. Once the Republican propagandists get behind him, I think he's a shoe in to win the nomination.
The conventional wisdom seems to be the dems will win in '08 because of Iraq. The conventional wisdom will be wrong if the dems aren't ready to fight as dirty as the republicans will with this Thompson "tough-guy, conservative" character as america's hero. The dem nominee will be portrayed as anti-american, and the republican propagandists will be very good at this.
In the past, the institutional checks and balances of the US constitutional system have served to sooner or later neutralize the worst effects of authoritarianism in American governance. But advances in technology combined with the energetic efforts of the Bushevics and their chorus of true believers to systematically abolish those institutional correctives is engendering a political crisis without equal in American history.
The current crop of presidential candidates *could* be evaluated on the basis of their endorsement of or opposition to the well-advanced transformation of the US into a banana republic, and on the basis of their endorsement of the expansion or the contraction of the American Empire and its acts of aggression.
Many Americans, however, will be assessing the candidates in terms of who seems best able to protect them in one way or another, according to their greatest fears.
They'll be looking for the candidate, in other words, who's the biggest, strongest daddy.
