Stupid comments, and enlightening

First the 'oh no, our white, Christian male power structure is in jeopardy' moment. (What - a moment of truthiness, Bill?)

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we've got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don't need so many.

O'Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don't know, I don't know. We've got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you

Next, an idiotic comment proving that macho-guy Fred Thompson knows little or nothing of American history, let alone anybody else's...

In a recent blog post, he (Thompson) rebuked foreigners who don't like the United States: "our natural tendency is to tell the French, for example, that we'd rather not hear from them until the day when they need us to bail them out again."

Hey Fred - be thankful that the French were there to 'bail us out' in the very beginning. Those of us who actually read, and bothered to learn our own history, tend to figure we owed them one when we rescued them in WWII. The French spent a fortune on our revolution. I know you'd like to believe we did it all by ourselves, but get real. We were losing the revolution until the French 'bailed us out.'

Our little Republic would never would have existed without French money, French guns, French ammunition, and the French fleet: which drove the British out of the Chesapeake Bay in 1781. We'd have lost the freakin Revolution had the French not shown up with their armada for the battle of Yorktown. Didn't you hear about all of the years Benjamin Franklin spent in France during the Revolution, courting the French King? You can thank him too.

Not that you know about any of this...

The only guys around who may actually be more clueless than Thompson are, you guessed it, the media dunderheads who cover him. Apparently they are already swooning over his macho, maleness, tough-y-ness, and obvious mystique-y-ness.

On what do they base this judgment? Glenn Greenwald has a little fun with Newsweek's Howard Fineman and Time Magazine's Mark Halperin:

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.

It is obvious that these guys are literally praying that Thompson will be the guardian of their 'white, Christian, male power structure.' And so of course... they compare him with Reagan.

Actually, that may be the only comparison that works.

I still think we should run Clooney...