Watching a few minutes of a boring Fred Thompson talk in Iowa on CNN yesterday, I was struck by how blatant he was in pretending that he was Ron Paul in order to win the support of his audience. Specifically, he boasted that when he was in the U.S. Senate, and a vote on some bill was 99 to 1, “I was always the one,” he said. Of course, Ron Paul has been known for many years as “Dr. No” for being the lone dissenting vote on blatantly unconstitutional legislation. And I somehow doubt that Thompson was EVER “the one” to vote no; if so, he, too, would have had a reputation as the senate’s “Dr. No,” and libertarians would have been attracted to his cause. (Real libertarians, not the Thompson-supporting beltway “libertarian” crowd).

In an effort to satisfy any neocons in the room, in the next breath Thompson bragged of how he was the Senate “floor manager” of the bill that created what is arguably the worst government bureaucracy in the history of America: The Dept. Fatherland Security.