Like the vast majority, I don’t know enough to write with any particular insight on politics…or most stuff for the most part. But this article in the NYT on Fred D. Thompson has me interested in the what might be. Specifically, someone called President Fred. I thought having a Prime Minister Steve would sound odd. And it does. Fred is one of those names that has been forever altered. In this case by Mr. Flintstone. But this Fred seems to be made of some interesting stuff.
Next month, Mr. Thompson is expected to join the Republican race for president. While he is perhaps best known for playing the tough-minded District Attorney Arthur Branch on the NBC show “Law + Order,” it is his real-life role as an investigator of government wrongdoing that has become a central part of the political biography he hopes will propel him to the presidency…Mr. Thompson rose to national prominence in the mid-1970s. As chief counsel to the Republicans on the Senate Watergate committee, he famously asked the question that revealed the existence of the White House taping system that ultimately led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation. But Mr. Thompson was also an active participant in the White House’s efforts to deflect blame from the president and discredit his accusers, plotting strategy with Mr. Nixon’s lawyers and leaking them information.
Law + Order never much caught my imagination, at least not in the way that Homicide: Life on the Street did or House has – it lacks the wit and/or performance. So the claims of an actor to leadership, as with those of ideological hack, should fall on deaf ears. It is in the doing that a person makes of him or herself what they can be.