HANNITY: No, I want to keep that away from me. We'll get the big question out of the way first, because there was speculation you may announce on the 4th of July. Maybe it's after Labor Day. Are you planning on making an announcement that you're getting in this race anytime soon?On meeting for talks with our enemies:
THOMPSON: August is kind of a down month, not much going on, so it wouldn't make sense to do it in August, but clearly, I think you know the direction I'm headed in. A final decision will be made soon, and I'm just urging my friends to keep their powder dry.
We put our toe in the water a while back, haven't been planning this thing for years. It takes a while to get your organization together and get your apparatus going. But the response has been tremendous, and I can't tell you how appreciative I am for that. And we're going to respond to that. We'll have an announcement to make and the final decision to make in the near future.
THOMPSON: Well, as I understand it, Senator Clinton was suggesting that the thing she disagreed with was the fact that Clinton thought that they should send an envoy first to make sure that they wouldn't use it for propaganda purposes. My response to that is that I don't trust their envoy. I mean, what if he says that they won? It wouldn't mean anything.On his Republican opponents:
When you are at that high a level, when you're talking about national leaders or cabinet members or something like that, there's a symbolic factor that you have to consider.
These people are killing our people. These Iranians are doing everything they can to undermine us and have been for a while, through Hezbollah and otherwise. They perceive us to be weak right now. If we met with them at those levels now, it would look like we were coming to them. It would look like that we were weak, and they would use that for sure for propaganda purposes and recruiting purposes.
HANNITY: I've never understood, what's the first question that Barack Obama would ask Ahmadinejad? "Will you believe the historical fact that the Holocaust occurred?" "Will you please, Mr. Ahmadinejad, please stop threatening to wipe Israel off the map?" I'm trying to understand, where do you begin the negotiation with somebody with those extremist views?
THOMPSON: "Would you quit sending people and IEDs, explosive devices, and weaponry into Iraq killing our people right now?" No, it is a naive proposition. And you can always keep the avenues open at lower levels on a secretive basis, if they want to change their position on it, but there's no indication that they're going to do anything but look out for their self-interest.
A lot of political leaders think that they can persuade these tyrants by the force of their personality to move off their position. They won't. They look at it for what they consider to be their interest, and their interest is undermining us.
HANNITY: What do you think of the Republican candidates that you'll go up against in the primary? You've got — the leader right now is Rudy Giuliani. You've got Mitt Romney, Senator McCain in there. Obviously, you must have differences or else you wouldn't even be considering getting in the race. Where do you see some of the differences or distinctions in your positions?Here's something weird. The headline for the article is "Possible Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson on ‘Campaign’ Shakeup" but I couldn't find anything on the campaign shakeup in the interview. Too bad he didn't ask him about that, it would have been good to hear his response (though I doubt it would have been different from what he said in Houston).
THOMPSON: Sean, I don't want to talk about them. I really don't. I think it's going to be extremely important that we come out unified after this election. There will probably be times that, you know, you have to respond to soma things people are saying.
They're beginning now, because I'm perceived to be doing well, and they're getting a little bit disturbed that they've spent all this money and haven't done any better than they have, some of them, but I'm going to hang off of that for as long as I possibly can.
It's really between — as far as I'm concerned, I'm responding to what I think is going on out in the country today. I'm responding to what I perceive to be an opportunity the American people are giving me to establish myself and to prove that I'm worthy of their consideration. And if I can do that, these other guys are irrelevant; if I can't do that, then I'm irrelevant.
In other news:
This just makes me nuts:
The Rev. Laurence White, a Lutheran pastor who heads the Texas Restoration Project -- a group of pastors who push a conservative-values agenda and candidates to match -- calls Thompson "an establishment Republican of ambiguous principle." He said the Tennessean did little during eight years in the Senate to advance the anti-abortion agenda.He did more for abortion than Romney and Guiliani. And how anybody who is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-small government and is fiscally conservative could be called a centrist is beyond me. "Conservative" has to be redefined for Thompson not to qualify.
"I don't think nominating a centrist Republican who will tell us what they absolutely have to in order to keep us on the political reservation is a formula for achieving our basic goals," White said. "This pattern over the past few decades has gotten us nowhere."
"Fred Thompson's 'trophy wife' runs the show"
She has sometimes been dismissed as a tanned and bleached blonde "trophy wife", only ever glimpsed in sleek and glamorous outfits on the arm of her much older spouse.Looks like they're switching the template from bimbo to control freak and Hillary Clinton wannabe.
But in the past few days Jeri Thompson has suddenly emerged as the real political power behind her husband Fred's presidential campaign.
Mr Thompson, 64, a former senator and actor who is running second in most polls of Republican nominees even before he has officially declared his candidacy, last week replaced his campaign manager in a shake-up of his top team - which, it has emerged, was initiated by his wife.
Another senior aide quit after clashes with Mrs Thompson, a youthful-looking 40, who is in effect managing her husband's White House bid and has hiring and firing authority over staff, according to campaign insiders.
The upheavals have highlighted the key role of Mr Thompson's second wife, a lawyer and Republican political operative widely believed to have encouraged him to enter the fray. As her husband's de facto campaign manager, Mrs Thompson has the greatest hands-on role of any spouse in the presidential campaign, even though she has so far steered well clear of the political hustings.
Despite her political pedigree as a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, her sway over day-to-day operations is troubling some of her husband's supporters. "I do worry that Jeri is the one really running his campaign," said a Republican in Congress who describes himself as "likely" to support Mr Thompson. "She's smart, but that could be a recurring problem."
A campaign aide, also speaking anonymously, told The Washington Post that Mrs Thompson decided everything from the content of direct mailings to the date for her husband to make his official declaration, now expected at the end of the summer. "You name it - anything," said the aide.
Thompson's campaign will report contributions and expenditures on Tuesday:
Mr. Thompson’s supporters say he can fill what they see as a void for a true conservative who can also get elected. But there are also concerns about a summertime drop-off in enthusiasm and fund-raising, that the campaign has fallen short of its initial $5 million fund-raising target. (The “Friends of Fred Thompson” committee said it would report contributions and expenditures for the first time on Tuesday.)
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