BartBlog

Thompson Quits After He Dozes Off During One of His Own Speeches 

Your Tattler was trying to think of the worst possible analogy for amiable lump Fred Thompson quitting his GOP presidential bid and came up with this: Fred’s just like Oprah-grown media stalagmite Dr. Phil McGraw visiting Britney Spears in the hospital. Anyone who’s been watching American TV for the past couple of weeks could hardly have missed the story of the ding-dong alleged ‘singer/dancer’ hauled away in an ambulance after she refused to give up one of her frightened children to her useless ex-husband following a weekend visit. Common mortals would have found their court-order-defying behinds in jail, but the marginally-talented Ms. Spears, followed everywhere by a tribe of tabloid photographers and therefore a ‘celebrity,’ was directed instead to a hospital for psychiatric examination. Crass media ferret Dr. Phil felt a tingling in his tuber unassisted by pills at this opportunity to enhance his sludgy ratings and hurried his folksy- asshole persona on over to Britney’s hospital room, planning some sort of TV salvation special wherein he uses his magic powers of East Texas crapola to cure the former Disney Mouseketeer, because, yuh know, he just cares so much about this damned celebrity family. 

Your Tattlesnake has about as much use for the whole doomed Spears media spirochete as a third testicle on the bottom of his right foot, but I have to admit that I momentarily admired the little D-list bimbazoid for telling Dr. Phil in no uncertain terms to step out of her life. (It also confirms she’s not entirely insane.) 

What does this have to do with Fred Thompson? Glad you asked. Fred was foisted on the presidential election process largely by the efforts of the adenoidal dweebs at Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, a money-losing reactionary rag sponsored by Rupert Murdoch that infatuates itself as the voice of neoconservative intellectualism, were such a thing to exist. They tirelessly pumped up the case for Thompson to enter the race, convinced that Fred, being a conservative Hollywood actor, would naturally be the second coming of St. Ronnie the Overrated, the sole agreed-upon Republican icon since Coolidge. Other rightie media, intimidated by the sheer brainy heft of TWS’ editorial board, picked up the drumbeat of Fred’s Reaganesque invincibility as well, and the plotline went like this: If Thompson entered the race, he would shoot to the top of the polls and sweep aside the socially-liberal Rudy, the insincere Romney, the loathed McCain, and that bumpkin pipsqueak Huckabee. Apparently, they even convinced Fred himself; like a certain other boneheaded prediction by the mentatos at TWS, he thought his candidacy would be a cakewalk to the GOP nomination – why, he wouldn’t even have to campaign off the back of a pickup truck in relaxed-fit blue jeans to suck in the rubes of the Republican base; just announce he’s running and wait to be carried off to victory in a sedan chair by the grateful cheering sheeple, The End. 

Similar to Oprah’s creation Dr. Phil, Fred spouted a lot of home-spun nothing based on grade-school homilies, filtered through a slow gooey drawl that, to some 3-Card Monte players who think they’ll win one day, denotes a deep-fried authenticity rather than a pitchman’s eye-winking connivance or oblivious stupidity. Were it not for Oprah, McGraw might have labored on an anonymous psychologist, an annoyance to no one but his few patients; it’s said he had no ambition to be a TV star until chance selected him for notoriety. Fred also apparently had no particular yen to be president, until Bill Kristol’s Varsity Squad put the notion in his head. And, to complete this terrible analogy, the overreaching and none-too-bright ‘Dr. Phil’ Thompson has been rejected by the voters again and again, a collective Britney Spears telling the Cereal Box Freud Fraud to get lost. (A shame Phil is unlikely to take the merciful course Fred did and quit.) 

According to some sources, Oprah has now admitted her mistake in supporting Dr. Phil – she believed him to be more substantial and less of a jerk than he turned out to be. Although TWS has not confessed it made an error in trumpeting Fred, favorable coverage of his campaign by them, as the disaster became obvious, lessened to the point of negligibility. 

Speaking of apologies, Kristol, wearing his new top hat as columnist gravitas for The New York Times, has demanded an apology by those who opposed Petraeus’ surge plan in Baghdad. That the ‘success’ of the surge is still in doubt, even by Petraeus himself, passes unnoticed in Bill’s narrow fact-free universe, and it does highlight a voluminous amount of incredibly rancid gall by the same man who called for an apology by the anti-war crowd in 2003 after Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ PR stunt supposedly ended combat operations in Iraq.

Note to Bill: You can take your demand for an apology, and old Fred himself, and stick them where Mike Huckabee deposits the Arkansas flagpole in unfriendly strangers. A subsequent color photo on the cover of the Times of this blessed event would also be welcome and no doubt add many new subscribers. And don’t worry about offending the sensibilities of the Gray Lady’s readers – they’ve seen much worse from Judy Miller and Michael Gordon in the past six years.