Fred Thompson's Floppy Performance

In 1966, during his first political campaign, Ronald Reagan was asked what kind of governor he would be. "I don't know," he said. "I've never played a governor."

Using Reagan as a role model, Fred Thompson is running for President, but he just can't seem to get the dialogue right. Yesterday he told a South Carolina questioner "we will not be a safer America if the whole world watches us being defeated by a bunch of kids with improvised explosive devices."

Trying for Reaganesque earthiness, Thompson came up, as he often does, with a mouthful of mush, prompting Democratic candidate Joe Biden to call him "totally divorced from reality" about "a civil war between lethal militias."

Citing Thompson's foot-in-mouth flubs about Terri Schiavo, the Everglades and lethal injections in his home state, the National Journal noted that although "some conservatives herald Thompson as a modern-day Ronald Reagan, his recent gaffes seem to indicate he's more like the next George W. Bush."

Looking back at Reagan's presidency, Joan Didion observed that he "regarded his daily schedule as being something like a shooting script in which characters came and went, scenes were rehearsed and acted out, and the plot was advanced one day at a time."

But Reagan never blew his lines, something Thompson still has to learn.

White House Medical Emergency

Paging Dr. Bill Frist! The services of the nation’s foremost authority on brain-death are urgently required in the Oval Office.

Dr. Frist who, as Senate Majority Leader in 2005 diagnosed Terri Schiavo and detected signs of mental activity that had eluded all other physicians, should be called on to study George Bush’s apparent failure to recover from sedation for his colonoscopy last weekend.

What makes the condition dire is that, unlike Schiavo who lapsed into a seeming coma, the President is ostensibly awake but functioning in a trance-like condition that involves mindless repetition of automatic mantras.

The latest manifestation yesterday was particularly alarming as Mr. Bush sleep-spoke at the Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina.

“It’s hard to argue that Al Qaeda in Iraq,” the President intoned, “is separate from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda when the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq took an oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden.”

This incantatory repetition of Al Qaeda and bin Laden is a classic symptom of a thinking disorder that should be examined by a specialist like Dr. Frist, who discovered hope for Ms. Schiavo by studying videos of her.

The nation can only pray the President’s condition does not deteriorate to the point that Vice President Cheney, suffering as he does from intermittent rage attacks, has to summon the strength to take over White House responsibilities on a continuing basis.