Just in case, please see this, in the unlikely event that anyone didn't already realize that Fred Thompson holds dangerously extreme right-wing views, has a long history as a corporate and foreign-government Washington lobbyist (perhaps a tad inconsistent with his "folksy" red-pickup truck image), and is a complete hypocrite as a Vietnam era draft evader now trumpeting "military toughness;" and as a serial divorcé with a trophy wife 25 years younger than he trumpeting "traditional family values."
It is only through the massive ignorance of the public* and deliberate media eye-aversion that people like this can get away with running for office in this country, when their chief qualification is that they play an obnoxious autocrat on TV. I'd say the central thesis of Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason is pretty obviously bang-on right.
*Unrelated, but if you have doubt that Mencken was right about the ignorance of the masses, consider this. According to a survey cited on the CBC radio show Testing Science (a lecture by Harvard historian of science Steven Shapin), nearly 1 in 4, 24%, of the U.S. public recently surveyed did not know that the earth goes around the Sun.