Back to basics? No, back to bullshit.

Oh, fer chrissakes (Time$elect, thank goodness).

What Thompson’s campaign represents, then, is a return to basics. It’s not primarily engaged in the issues that have dominated recent G.O.P. politics. Thompson is campaigning to restore America’s constitutional soul. He’s going back to Madison and Jefferson and the decentralized federalism of the founders, at least as channeled through Goldwater. As Thompson himself said while running for Senate, “America’s government is bringing America down, and the only thing that can change that is a return to the basics.”

Thompson thus becomes one pole in the debate now roiling the G.O.P. Nobody is running as the continuation of Bush. The big question now is: should the party go back to the basics or should it jump forward and transform itself into something new? Thompson articulates the back-to-basics view in its purest form. Newt Gingrich articulates the transformational view in its purest form. The other candidates are a mishmash in between.

Gawd, David Brooks is a hack. With the prominent exception of Ron Paul, every single GOP candidate is running as the continuation of Bush. Not one has condemned, let alone proposed rolling back the administration's "Unitary Executive" notions of presidential power. Besides Paul, not one has suggested that the war in Iraq was an incredibly stupid idea. Nary a one has suggested that we should not conduct ourselves Imperially. And, most tellingly, of the leading GOP candidates, only John McCain has differentiated himself from this bunch of "I had other priorities" during the Vietnam War "tough guys," in denouncing the use of torture to extract information from "the terraists."

The base of the GOP still loves George W. Bush and approves of all "9/11 changed everything" he does. If David Brooks doesn't understand that he's a moron.

But I think he knows that very well.

We learned in 2000 that the Republican party and their mouthpieces are just cynical enough to nominate a drooling fool if they thought he could convey the right "folksy" image Amuricans just looooove and install into office their very own sock puppet. Nevermind that you could wade through the guy's deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet. And we also learned they would steal an election to put their fool into office. I know that's hard to believe, but it happened.

Well, here we go again.

But that's all to be expected. What is so amazingly depraved in Brooks' column is this: he has spent the past six years applauding an administration that has turned the U.S. Constitution into a relic of a "quaint" past, a pathetic document that cannot effectively address the challenges we face when scary brown people -- who hate us for our freedoms, dontcha know -- might destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with nothing more than a blowtorch and a virgin-filled dream. But now, as that administration crashes and burns, polling at a giddy 28% approval rating, it's back to Goldwatery "basics." Bullshit. Fred Thompson is going "back to basics" because he Doesn't. Have. A. Single. Idea. of how to govern this country. Much like the sociopath in the office currently who turned this country over to Richard Cheney and his band of merry torturers and serial deficit creators while he went mountain biking.

And the really cool thing is, just like the packaging of George W. Bush in 1999 when he was positioned as the congenial frat boy you'd like to have a beer with (not like that boring ol' brainiac, Gore) rather than a failed businessman who relied on his father's connections, Thompson's non-achieving background is papered over and he is instead the guy he plays on the damned teevee. As Greenwald limns:

Here is Thompson's biography -- his own official, endorsed version. He's been a government lawyer, an actor and a Senator. Though Thompson does not mention it, he also has been -- for two decades -- what a 1996 profile in The Washington Monthly described as "a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests." This folksy, down-home, regular guy has spent his entire adult life as a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, except when he was an actor in Hollywood.

And -- like the vast, vast majority of Republican "tough guys" who play-act the role so arousingly for our media stars, from Rudy Giuliani to Newt Gingrich -- Thompson has no military service despite having been of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War (Thompson turned 20 in 1962, Gingrich in 1963, Giuliani in 1964). He was active in Republican politics as early as the mid-1960s, which means he almost certainly supported the war in which he did not fight.

So what exactly, in Fineman's eyes, makes Thompson such a "tough guy"? Fineman clone Mark Halperin, in a fawning piece in Time last week -- hailing Thompson's "magnetism" and praising him as "poised and compelling" and exuding "bold self-confidence" -- provides the answer:

Even before his Law & Order depiction of district attorney Arthur Branch, Thompson nearly always played variations on the same character -- a straight-talking, tough-minded, wise Southerner -- basically a version of what his supporters say is his true political self.

And he is often cast as a person in power -- a military official, the White House chief of staff, the head of the CIA, a Senator or even the President of the U.S. It could be called the Cary Grant approach to politics. As the legendary actor once explained his own style and success, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person."

The only thing that makes Thompson a "tough guy" is that he pretends to be one; he play-acts as one. There is nothing real about it. But in the same way that George Bush's ranch and fighter pilot costumes (along with his war advocacy) sent media stars swooning over his masculinity and "toughness," the Howard Finemans and Mark Halperins, along with the Bush followers in need of a new authoritarian Leader, are so intensely hungry for this faux masculine power that the illusion, the absurd play-acting, is infinitely more valuable to them than any reality, than any genuine attributes of "toughness."

Ah, but for Republicans, it's the posturing that matters.

Oh, and that thing about Thompson not running as a continuation of Bush, Greenwald continues,

Marvel at this quote from Thompson, from CNN on March 1, 2003, when he was urging the invasion of Iraq:

Can we afford to appease Saddam, kick the can down the road? Thank goodness we have a president with the courage to protect our country. And when people ask what has Saddam done to us, I ask, what had the 9/11 hijackers done to us -- before 9/11?

That is quite an incredible mentality, and it has applicability for all sorts of situations. One can easily extend it:

THOMPSON: I think we should invade and bomb Uruguay.

QUESTION: What has Uruguay done to us?

THOMPSON: When people ask what has Uruguay done to us, I ask, what had the 9/11 hijackers done to us -- before 9/11?

That mindset can be described by many adjectives, but "tough" is not one of them. "Toughness" can be demonstrated by actually fighting in a war. "Toughness" is demonstrated when a political candidate tells people what they do not want to hear. "Toughness" is not demonstrated by sending other people to war. But people like Fineman (i.e., media purveyors of Beltway conventional wisdom) reflexively, and incoherently, equate blind militarism and warmongering with "toughness" even though it is anything but.

This is what Thompson said last month when interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News:

WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?

THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing.

Outside of the dwindling band of dead-ender neocons and other assorted Bush followers, the only people who mistake that sort of mindset -- " I would do essentially what the president's doing" -- with "toughness" are Beltway pundits who continue to promote the view that the more wars one urges, the more militarism one embraces, the "tougher" one is. Conversely, the more one wants to avert sending fellow citizens into war, the "weaker" or "softer" one is, or -- to use Fineman's post-debate formulation -- the less "masculine" one is.

I know I don't need to tell you, Dear Readers, that we are in for it once again. All the players from the 2000 election and the run-up to the Iraq War are back at it. It's going to take a great deal of effort to keep them from bullshitting this country into making another terrible mistake, perhaps with another shotgun wedding presided over by an Alito Court.