I hope they played the tape for him, Russert-style.

Fred Thompson is a goner anyway. Why are they even bothering to talk to him? He's polling lower than Ron Paul.

omg i <3 law & order!

Seriously. Well, until it got bad. When Adam Schiff went away they had that pansy chick who made all liberals look bad. And then that big drawling Southern idiot.

AND THEN SERENA WAS GAY?!

And then the ADA got her eyes poked out or something. Poor Jack, losing another one to reckless fictional violence and bad contracting decisions.

It's all a blur. You can only watch 400 or so episodes of Law & Order before it's all sort of the same thing. Must be true for politics as well.

Another Bush acolyte who prefers life in the non-reality-based world.

The Monty Python Parrot Sketch comes to mind.

This would be tragic if Thompson had ANY chance at all ...

But he's just a sad old dude, and the only things I can see that he has in common with Ronald Reagan is forgetfulness and wrinkles. Oh, and a total lack of understanding of economics.

One must at all times keep in mind Richard Milhous Nixon's analysis of Thompson: Mean and dumb.

Amen.

LOL! As a certified L&O addict who has seen every McCoy episode at least 20 times (I tape the TNT rerums), I am dying to find out what you think of Jack as DA and that android who's the new exec ADA.

To be honest, I stopped watching regular L&O about the time Elisabeth Rohm quit. It seemed to me that the quality of that show just kept on slipping and slipping... now I mostly watch SVU, and sometimes even CI, although it's not my favorite. I watch L&O reruns on TNT occasionally.

But I'm glad McCoy is the new DA, rather than some random new actor they could pull in. Neither Diane Weiss's character nor Fred Thompson's could really match the wry, sardonic wisdom of Adam Schiff, and they both ended up being caricatures of themselves. To me, Law & Order sort of reached its high point during the Jamie Ross-Abbie Carmichael era, and has sort of been beating itself into irrelevance ever since.

As for the new ADA (and AADA?), I have no idea what they're like. You'd have to tell me!

Abbie Carmichael, with her oodles of badassitude, is the only hyperconservative woman I have ever loved :-)

If you plan to ask a politician a question that contains the words, "when you said," "what did you mean," or, "can you explain your previous statement regarding," or any other formulation of words that involves a transcript, and/or a tape, you need to have the tape available.

I think we should start drafting David Caruso, Mark Harmon, Dann Florek or any of the other older denziens of the procedural crime dramas to replace Thompson as the Republican candidate of choice.

Here I am, writing my memoirs, in my penthouse designed by the great futurist, Zaha Hadid, sigh. Alerto, my dog, you are so moody. Sometimes I rue the day that I took you in after...

Rosenkevalier, you're right about the heyday episodes of Jamie and Abby and Adam Schiff, although the first two new episodes revealed a McCoy as DA who is less a caricature of himself and more a faithful heir to Schiff.

The AADA is the same chick from last season, so bland I don't even notice her name. But the new exec ADA - good grief, he's a worse actor than Thompson! A situation that would have had McCoy bouncing off the walls and Schiff firing his ass played like an elementary-school parent-teacher conference.

Sigh. Jerry Orbach is spinning in his grave.

All the responses here, especially the analyses of "Law and Order" are more relavent than Fred Thompson. (And I haven't watched that show since Sam Waterston first became DA (can't stand him)).

Hey, he really is like Bush n' raygun. They were blatant liars who kept lying when called on it. Don't these morons know about videotape? Oh, that's right: they're morons. If the fascists could hybridize Mitt the Twit and Dead Fred they'd have the perfect republikan candidate: a mush mouthed cracker who looks like a botoxed tee vee anchorthingy. What a pack of jackals. I watched some excerpts from the South Carolina "dumb-bate" and it was a race to the bottom of the septic tank. This is the worst group of candidates in living memory, and I remember every face since Ike won in '52.

Who cares what that old gasbag Thompson has to say. He barely wakes up long enough to emit a couple of rotten old farts, grumble, and go back to his cot. Memo to Thompson's wife: Appearing in porno films would be less degrading than your sham marriage to this incontinent old creep. What kind of a freak are you?

Two words: Tom Selleck.

Magnum President...

... to have anything you quote a candidate as saying, already cued up to replay if they deny saying it?

Not hard at all -- except then you might be known as a tough interviewer, and all the candidates in the future would avoid you like the plague.