Categorical Aperitif

It looks like once again I won't be doing Daily (or yesterdaily) Random Flickr Blogging until tomorrow at earliest, but in the meantime, by all means go read Matt Taibbi on Fred Thompson:

Thompson may act like a blank slate -- a homespun version of Being There hero Chauncey Gardiner running on a platform of "Whatever you say" and "I'll get back to you on that" -- but he represents something else that no one, after seven years of George W. Bush, could possibly have expected: a new low. It was bad enough when the GOP field was led by a grinning Mormon corporatist and a fascist ex-mayor itching to take his prostate pain out on the world, but Thompson is the worst yet -- a human snooze button, campaigning baldly for the head-in-the-sand vote by asking Americans not to think but to change the channel.

And that, after all, is what the campaign trail is all about. Give voters a chance to go lower than they've ever gone before, and you'll get numbers in a heartbeat. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the next Republican front-runner. ***

In person, Fred Thompson reminds you of a lot of good actors who go numb when asked to play themselves. If you've ever listened to interviews with Laurence Olivier or Robert De Niro or any of a hundred other talented performers who can manhandle a script but seem at a loss when it comes to who they themselves really are, you'll recognize the same thing in Thompson.

That makes it all the more painful when you watch him try to sell his oddly thin biography as a great "American story." He has a few items of note on his résumé: minority counsel for the Republicans during the Watergate hearings (where he tipped off the White House that the committee knew about Nixon's secret tapes), lawyer for a Tennessee whistle-blower who exposed a cash-for-clemency scam in the governor's office, and two largely undistinguished terms as a U.S. senator. In between, there are about twenty-eight years of his adult life where he acted in bit parts in a few movies, and lobbied a little. Thompson's campaign video runs out of stuff to talk about after around ninety-eight seconds.

But he is on television, and has been in a movie with Sean Connery, and in the world of politics -- which is basically Hollywood for the ugly and talentless -- that makes him something close to a god on Earth, a veritable rock star. And despite his disinterested pose and empty-suit résumé, his TV persona gives him a natural advantage on the trail, one that most politicians can only dream of.

You have to see it to believe it, the effect that Fred Thompson has on certain crowds. Reporters who describe his public appearances as "bland" and "uninspiring" and "vague" and "blurry" do so because they're looking for the wrong thing; they're looking for theatrics, for fire and brimstone, for that candidate who can get crowds howling for blood. What Thompson inspires is something much more appropriate for Americans of the TV age: He gets audiences purring in a cozy stupor. Their eyes glaze over and they end up looking like a bunch of flies happily lapping up their own puke.

[...]

It's only after you run into this lobotomy act ten or eleven times that you start to see the dark essence of Fred Thompson. He is hard to dislike on a personal level: Unlike the overconfident district attorney he plays on Law and Order, the real-life Thompson comes off as a halting, humble, accidental celebrity who's really just dern glad to be here. And his personality seems consistent with his Goldwater-era ideology: A believer in limited government, he seeks to achieve his ends by getting his frankly limited self elected to the White House.

His politics, though, are another matter. As a political animal, Thompson embodies the twisted core of the Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh era: He looks you right in the eye with that aw-shucks face of his and tells you shit that just isn't true about who we are as a country. In his first few days on the campaign trail, he paces back and forth in front of crowds of Iowans and assures them without blinking that "we have the best health-care system in the world" -- and you sit there wondering how the hell he can get away with saying that when America's infant mortality rate is behind fricking Slovenia's.

But by then Thompson is talking about how France and England are desperate to copy our market-based system of health care. And then he's on to Iraq, where we "went in for the right reasons" because Saddam was planning a "nuclearized Middle East" that "would have defeated all of us," assertions that leave the bad-news-weary crowd dewy-eyed with approval. Thompson represents the essential bullshit at the heart of modern conservatism: The fantasy that we are the benevolent envy of the world must be believed at all costs, no matter how much waste or mayhem or loss of young lives is suffered in deference to it.

// posted by nash @ 1:41 PM