The sooth sayer

Perhaps if Fred Thompson gets to the point where he's considered a serious candidate, he will need a single, mindless slogan like "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" or "I like Ike" or the infamous "Don't swap horses in midstream" that succeeded in re-electing the thug Nixon by a landslide.

I would suggest "you can beat a dead horse for ever." I'm not referring to Thompson's wishfully described resemblance to a dead ex-president, since he reminds me much more of a character from Howdy Doody than Reagan, but to his relentless thumping on that large lump of equine carrion, the Nuclear Weapons Plants of Saddam Hussein.

In a fulsome speech at a Newton, Iowa cafe today, the Bullet headed buffoon from Tennessee concluded that although there was no evidence for such things found in Iraq and although hiding a uranium processing facility large enough to produce weapons would be harder than hiding the Pentagon under the wide open skies of Iowa, Saddam none the less had one until the day we invaded. He just knows. And even if he didn't have one then, he would "clearly" have one by now, said he to a "crowd" of about 60 people.

Perhaps Thompson cultivates the appearance of a crystal ball because he would like you to believe that he, like some fortune teller, sees into the past and future and into the minds of dead dictators as well. It doesn't work with me - he just looks like another cheap carnival huckster.