See previous: 2007.04.24 Decision '08 Roundup

Fred Thompson's Secret Weapon
David Brody (Hat tip: Don Surber)

If Fred Thompson gets into the presidential race (which pretty much everyone expects him to do), he's definitely going to be a serious player. He has a lot of advantages but one of his biggest may be his wife. From all accounts, Jeri Thompson is very smart and media savvy. She's been a media consultant and has worked in GOP circles for years. Talk about a top notch pairing! If Americans go for this, it could be two for the price of one. You get a conservative politician turned actor turned politician again...and you get a potential First Lady who could end up being one of the smartest and dynamic the country has ever seen.  ...

Below the fold:

• Rudy: Democrats Want A 9/10 World
• ‘Fred for president’ chorus grows
• McCain to make it official today
• CQ Radio Transcript: Duncan Hunter, Part II
• Black like Hillary

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Newer items are added at the top. Please treat this post as a blog within a blog, come back often, and scroll down till you see something that was here on your last visit.

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Rudy: Democrats Want A 9/10 World
Ed Morrissey

Of all the candidates running for president, Rudy Giuliani knows best what a 9/10 mentality means in an age of radical Islamist terror. He had to deal with the aftermath of bureaucratic confusion and politically-correct counterterrorism on 9/11 and the weeks afterward as the mayor of a city who saw almost 3,000 of his citizens killed by terrorists. So when Giuliani talks about the folly of returning to the defense against terrorists, he knows of what he speaks:

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani wrapped up a day of campaigning in New Hampshire on Tuesday night by issuing a stark warning that Democrats would put the country on defense in the campaign against terrorism and needlessly prolong a conflict that he said America can and must win. ...

"If one of them gets elected, it sounds to me like we're going on the defense," he said. "We've got a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. We're going to wave the white flag there. We're going to try to cut back on the Patriot Act. We're going to cut back on electronic surveillance. We're going to cut back on interrogation. We're going to cut back, cut back, cut back, and we'll be back in our pre-September 11 mentality of being on defense." ...

Giuliani called the war on terror "the defining conflict of our time," and that cuts many ways. The conflict will define political parties and movements based on how they approach it; it will define nations based on whom they support; and it will define an era based on who eventually prevails. Rudy wants to continue the forward strategy of engaging terrorists and their sponsors abroad with the American military, rather than allow terrorists to gather their strength abroad for an attack on the US, with law-enforcement resources as our only defense. ...

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‘Fred for president’ chorus grows

WHEN his daughter Betsy died, Fred Thompson, a genial 6ft 6in senator for Tennessee, lost his enthusiasm for the rough and tumble of politics. Shortly afterwards he announced that he would not run for reelection. ...

Fred Thompson said at the time that he would not miss the Senate. “For me, the George Washington example of serving eight years and riding out of town on a horse and never returning has great appeal.” He vowed to keep his hand in politics, teach a bit, write his memoirs and carry on with his part-time acting career.

It dawned on him this year that he could ride back into town as president only when, one by one, the conservative choices for the 2008 Republican ticket revealed their flaws. They seemed out of sync with the party or the country or both. Thompson’s name began to be aired by old friends and party power-brokers and, suddenly, the idea of Fred Thompson for president caught fire.

Thompson, a good ol’ Southern boy with bags of charm to match those under his eyes and chin, is already known to millions as a tough district attorney in the hugely popular TV series Law and Order and has appeared in films such as In the Line of Fire, with Clint Eastwood, and The Hunt for Red October with Sean Connery.

A national poll last week put Thompson, 64, in second place behind Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, and three points ahead of Senator John McCain — and he hasn’t even declared yet that he is running or spent a cent on campaigning. It suggests that he has the potential to be frontrunner in the Republican field. ...

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McCain to make it official today
Lorie Byrd

I don't profess to understand the presidential candidate announcement dance, but am getting the hang of it. First they announce they are thinking about running, then they announce they are setting up an exploratory committee, then they announce they are going to announce. I guess the last step is the actual announcement that they are definitely, for sure, not kidding, gonna run. That is what John McCain will be doing today in New Hampshire. Then they run, which is what they have been doing all along. ...

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CQ Radio Transcript: Duncan Hunter, Part II 
Ed Morrissey

Here is the second half of my conversation with Duncan Hunter on the inaugural installment of the daily CQ Radio show. Part 1 can be found here.

EM: Let’s move on to the borders. Now, you live nearby the border in southern California, and obviously this is an issue politically. How susceptible are we on the southern border to terrorist infiltration because of our border situation?

DH: Well, we’re very susceptible to infiltration of anything because we have essentially open borders, except for the small area in California where I built the double border fence. ...

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Black like Hillary
Michelle Malkin

My syndicated column this week:

In 1992, Bill Clinton hit a political home run with his "Sister Souljah" moment. In 2007, Hillary Clinton suffered a reverse "Sister Souljah" strikeout. If it's not the end of her presidential aspirations, it should be.

Allow me to explain. Fifteen years ago, then-Gov. Clinton was looking to solidify his centrist credentials. An obscure quote by an obscure radical rapper provided the perfect exploitable opportunity. Interviewed by The Washington Post in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, Souljah had wondered aloud: "If Black people kill Black people every day, . . . "why not have a week and kill white people?"

Bill Clinton took to the bully pulpit at the Rainbow Coalition and denounced Sister Souljah. "If you took the words 'white' and 'black' and you reversed them," he lectured sternly, "you might think David Duke was giving that speech."

Political cheerleaders framed this as an act of political bravery - publicly repudiating an extremist racial separatist's rhetoric to demonstrate independence from minority grievance-mongers in the Democrat Party.

Sen. Clinton - whom conventional wisdom mistakenly casts as the smarter, more disciplined politician of the household - didn't learn from her hubby's Sister Souljah triumph. She turned it on its head: Instead of dissociation with racial extremists, she has chosen ingratiation.

And the results are comedy bordering on political suicide. ...