"Fire In The Belly"

Will people please shut up about this stupid non-issue. The man is running for President of the United States and he's skidding around Iowa in the snow in a charter bus kissing snotty children and eating "colorful" local food, which I think in Iowa is when they put salt on the french fries. People claim they despise politicians for their pathetic ambition and then here comes someone who conspicuously refuses to salivate on cue and say I AM THE GOLDEN CHILD! BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP ME!!! Oh, well, he must not really want it then.

No, he doesn't want to be President. He just loves debating with Ron Paul. He just loves fielding moronic questions from ham-headed local reporters. He just kissed off a plum lifetime job on one of NBC's flagship dramas, where the catering truck was right there and the interviews by the entertainment press were light and fluffy and respectful and there weren't any "hand shows" about global warming.

Of course, he'll always treasure those hours spent in briefings talking about ethanol subsidies to policy wonks. You just know he gets a warm fuzzy feeling coming up hat in hand to strangers, asking them to keep his campaign bus fueled and his commercials on the air. And he just gets his rocks off on having James Dobson wonder whether he's really a Christian or not. Woo hoo!

And isn't great, getting to spend all this time away from his family? Is his baby son going to start talking one of these days? Hey, he'll get a call about it. He likes having people nationwide sniff about his wife and call her a control freak and whisper about their age difference. He loves how that makes her feel and hey, he just knows this kind of thing is gonna be great for their marriage.

And yet he's still out there, throwing snowballs. He doesn't want to be President, you see; he's just a masochist.

I swear, if I was in Fred Thompson's shoes and someone asked me one more flipping time about the "fire in my belly" I would unleash the longest, foulest stemwinder of pure wild-eyed Clark Griswold-esque profanity ever broadcast on Iowa Public Television. Instead, he responds like this.

If people really want in their president super type-a personality, someone who has gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night and been thinking about for years how they win the presidency of the united states, someone who can look you straight in the eye and say they enjoy every minute of campaigning, I ain’t that guy. So I hope I’ve discussed that and didn’t talk you out of anything. I honestly want – I can’t imagine a worse set of circumstances [than] achieving the Presidency of the United States under false pretenses. I go out of my way to be myself.

Let's lay this moron-meme to rest right now. I don't care if you're for Fred or not, and I don't care if you attack his issues or his record. Actually, scratch that. I'd love for pundits to start talking about his policy positions and his voting record! Exactly which aspect of his plan for border security or social security do you disagree with? What part of his rhetoric rings false? Which part of his doctrine of resolve, or his understanding of first principles do you disagree with, and which candidate's principles are better? That's a debate, and that's what we're supposed to be having now.

"Fire in the belly" is a completely meaningless statement. It's subjective and irrefutable--or, more precisely, it's unfalsifiable. You can't prove it, and beyond what I've laid out here you can't disprove it, so it just hangs around like a bad smell. It's the recourse of political commentators too lazy or too biased or unable to come up with serious objections to Fred. From now on when I hear pundits trot out that canard, I'm going to ask whether they really want their own jobs--you know, whether they're a just little bit lazy, whether they're just phoning it in, and whether they've got any fire in their own bellies.

UPDATE: Tammy Bruce phones it in on the No-Fred Channel. Oooh, they finally bring her on to discuss him...to say she's written him off. Thanks, Fox!