The Republican Fantasy

Matt Taibbi is a god - I would give my eye teeth to write like him. This story is about a lot more than Fred Thompson's presidential campaign - it's about the crazy way we elect a president and the crazy fantasy that Republicans are embracing in an overwhelming world. Great, great stuff and a lot less profanity than usual. This story appeared in RollingStone, where I read it, but this link is from another site (I also included a couple of pithy excerpts).

http://www.alternet.org/story/63351/

September 24, 2007
Fred Thompson: Desperate Republicans Cheer for a Reagan Wannabe
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com

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.

What Thompson is selling is escapism, pure and simple. He's selling America not as a vast adventure epic [as Reagan did] but as a timid, forty-seven-minute made-for-cable movie about a folksy small-town dad -- a fantasy that makes no sense at all in the context of a massive militarized oligarchy currently occupying half the world's deserts on borrowed money.