The lede in a Politico article yesterday really shows the extent to which some people have bought into the Fred Thompson hype:

When Fred Thompson finally announces his candidacy next month, it will be the closest thing to a successful draft of a presidential candidate in more than a half-century.

There are two big problems here:

1) The Thompson draft, with the image of a reluctant candidate being drawn in, was pretty much fake. And Thompson admitted as much to USA Today a few months ago:

“I can’t remember exactly the point that I said, ‘I’m going to do this,'” Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. “But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: ‘I’m going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.'”

2) It’s not the first successful draft since Eisenhower — and we don’t have to go far back to find another. Are our attention spans and long-term recall so short that nobody remembers the Draft Clark movement? It was only four years ago.

Just this afternoon we were on Rudy Giuliani’s case for suggesting that his flipflop on the endability of illegal immigration was not a flipflop but merely a response to the breakthrough technologies that have been developed over the last decade. But is it possible Rudy’s cronyism may be a mightier sword than his bamboozlement.

It turns out that not only does Rudy have a ‘technology’ in mind but he’s been cut in on some equity in the company that makes it and by an odd coincidence he thinks the federal government should buy a whole lot of it.

TPM Reader JN pointed me to this nugget in Peter Boyer’s profile of Rudy in the current issue of The New Yorker …

As for securing the border, Giuliani proposes the construction of what he calls “a technological fence,” which he insists would be much more effective than a simple physical barrier. Giuliani’s security division is a part owner of a company that is developing such technology with the defense contractor Raytheon. The innovation is a sensor-based platform that can be launched aloft and will “see” a twenty-kilometre area, in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama. “It will be able to conduct a surveillance, actually,” a person familiar with the project told me. “It can follow an individual, or follow a car, at very far distances.” Giuliani emphasized to me, “It doesn’t have to be that technology. We have no desire to have Raytheon benefit or whatever. There are a hundred other technologies similar to that, with the ability to process data and communicate.”

So to review, in 1994, Giuliani believed that with America’s ethnic diversity and long borders it simply wasn’t possible to end illegal immigration without turning the country into a police state. But now thanks to the onward march of technology that’s no longer a problem because Rudy’s company can install this ultra fence which appears to constantly spawn mini-Predator drones which will keep the illegals under active surveillance until they show up for work at your local restaurant before vaporizing them with a missile or something.

A few days ago we posted ten year old video of Rudy Giuliani admitting that there’s no way we can end illegal immigration in a country like ours without destroying our civil liberties and probably destroying the economy too. That has proved a bit difficult to reconcile with his latter-day pledge to “end illegal immigration” once and for all.

So faced with this awkward contradiction the Giuliani campaign is grasping for an explanation even more laughable and ridiculous than the original contradiction.

According to the Giuliani campaign, all Giuliani meant was that back in 1994 the technology did not yet exist to hermetically seal the gazillion mile border of the United States and end illegal immigration once and for all.

Like I said, some answers amount to such transparently ridiculous bamboozlement that they absolutely guarantee future hilarity.

What technology would it be that Rudy is talking about? The dramatic breakthroughs in electronic fence design? Google maps? Apparently he says it’s new breakthroughs in surveillance technology.

What breakthrough technology do you think Rudy’s talking about that will allow the United States to “end” illegal immigration once and for all without damaging our civil liberties or affecting our economy, which is what Rudy said it would do back in 1994?

We interrupt this blog to bring you a few moments of straight talk from His Straightness, Sen. Fred Thomspon (R-TN) …

“We are going to be getting in if we get in, and of course, we are in the testing the waters phase. We’re going to be making a statement shortly that will cure all of that. But yeah, we’ll be in traditionally when people get in this race.”

Got that?

You know Alberto Gonzales the liar. But do you know the lies? Here’s our rundown of the top six untruths (or grossly misleading half-truths) that have fallen from our attorney general’s mouth.

Last night we brought you the news of Patrick Syring, the 20-year career Foreign Service officer, who has been indicted for harassing the staff of the Arab Institute with a string of phone messages and emails saying among other things that the “only good Arab is a dead Arab”, that various members of the staff were “wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs [who] should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond” and lauding the Israelis for “bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age where it belongs.”

Turns out the AP story left a fair amount of Syring’s tirades out of their story.

Here’s the indictment with all the details.

Late Update: For the record, the folks at the Arab American Institute, the ones on the receiving end of Syring’s abuse, released this statement …

Yesterday afternoon we were notified that the grand jury has returned two indictments charging a long-time State Department employee with Threatening Communication in Interstate Commerce and violating the civil rights of the employees of the Arab American Institute.

James Zogby, the president of AAI, said, “We are pleased with word that the grand jury has returned two indictments. This has been a matter of concern to me and my entire office. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has been responsive, and we feel protected. The threats were both intimidating and frightening – and the fact that the defendant was a 20-year career officer at the Department of State made it of even greater concern.”

Wow, that’s great news. CNN is running as a breaking news headline that President Putin says that Russia will resume regular long-range flights of its ‘strategic’ bombers. To decode what that means, during the Cold War the US and the USSR both keep a fleet of bombers packed with nuclear weapons in the air at all times. That’s one third of the trident — ballistic missiles in the ground, strategic bombers in the air and nuclear submarines hidden in the vast depths of the sea, together making each sides’ nuclear arsenal impervious to a first strike knock out blow.

That was the theory at least.

If memory serves both sides stopped regular flights of their strategic bomber fleets during the first Bush administration.

Obviously, having them in the air doesn’t mean they’re going to be used. And they can be scrambled at any time. But unlike ‘targeting’ of nuclear missiles, which is I think literally a matter of keying in a few numbers to a computer, not having these jets permanently in the air is more than a symbolic sign of having the finger a bit off the nuclear trigger.

And it raises an important point. Not everything that happens these days is uniquely President Bush’s fault. Vladimir Putin is no great shakes either. And you can debate whether this is more a reaction to the White House’s aggressive push for missile defense shields and military deals with countries on Russia’s border or more part of Putin’s own growing authoritarianism, trying to stoke xenophobia and increased militarism.

What is not debatable however is that there is more going on in the world — more opportunities and more threats — than what happens in the few hundred mile radius around the ancient capital of Baghdad. There is, as we can see, Russia, which still has a few thousand nuclear warheads which could cause some serious headaches. There’s China, a vast economic and potential military power that will bulk larger and larger in our lives over the course of this century. There’s Pakistan, India, half a billion people to our south speaking Spanish and Portuguese. The list goes on and on.

But our whole national dialog, hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot more are going to Iraq. And more generally the fantasy 450 year long-war epic battle with the Islamofascists. We’re close to breaking the US Army and Marine Corps with over-extended deployments. And in hotspots around the world, there’s a vacuum, as the world sort of rushes past us. In many ways this is the greatest danger in Iraq, not that our future as a nation is at stake in staying (as the right would have it) or even that it’s necessarily at stake in leaving but that our engagement with the country has fixed us with a dangerous national myopia which is letting many other problems fester unattended for going on a decade.

New polls find Edwards grabbing a lead in Iowa, while Hillary is well ahead in Nevada and California. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

How much did John Ashcroft really know about the warrantless surveillance program? As Alberto Gonzales (repeatedly) said on July 24 in testimony, it’s “complicated.”

It seems that 20-year career Foreign Service officer Patrick Syring wasn’t cut out for bringing America’s message of tolerance, peace and democracy to the Middle East.

Last summer, while the bloody but inconclusive war between Israel and Hezbollah raged over the skies of Israel and Lebanon, Syring reached out to James Zogby, the highly-respected head of the Arab-American Institute to let him know that “The only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese. The only good Arab is a dead Arab.”

That was in a phone message left on Mr. Zogby’s voice mail.

Later he followed up in an email, noting that “You wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond. The United States would be safer without you.” And while Zogby does not represent the Israelis, Syring made a point of praising them for “bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age where it belongs.”

And if all Syring’s other shortcomings weren’t enough it seems he’s also a little lacking in brainpower since he identified himself in his voice mails and sent the emails from his personal email account.

Syring retired from the Foreign Service last month and was indicted on Wednesday for sending threatening messages by phone and email.

Late Update: It seems Syring sort of made a habit of this. In a letter to the editor in response to Robert Schmuhl’s ‘Going our Way: A New Foreign Policy‘, a foreign policy think piece published in the Notre Dame alumni magazine, Syring wrote, “Professor Schmuhl’s implicit defense of the wicked regime of Saddam Hussein, and his sympathy for Arab terror, is abhorrent and despicable. His evil brings shame to American scholarship and to the University. He should burn in hell for eternity for the terrorism he advocates.”

Also nice to know, back in 1994, Syring was working out of the US Embassy in Lebanon.