Fred Thompson Bombs On Campaign Trail

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The New York Times presents a searing portrait of Fred Thompson's lackluster performance on the campaign trail, with the worst damage done within the quotes attributed to the candidate.

"Can I have a round of applause?" Thompson is forced to ask a silent Iowan audience at the end of his 24 minutes of remarks. After a rustle of clapping and some laughter, he grumbles, "Well, I had to drag that out of you."

Drag seems to be the operative word here. Iowans saw a "subdued, laconic candidate who spoke in a soft monotone, threw few elbows and displayed little drive to distinguish himself from opponents," the Times reported. After he spoke recently, "stillness engulfed the room."

It may be that Thompson doesn't talk loud because he's not too sure of what he's talking about. In an interview with Kay Henderson of Radio Iowa on Monday, he referred to the "Soviet Union and China." At the end of her blog post on the exchange, Henderson wrote, "No, I did not mistype. Thompson said Soviet Union rather than Russia."

None Dare Call It Torture

The New York Times stops just short of using the "T word," preferring to call it "severe interrogations." But let's not beat around the bush: Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department secretly approved torture -- even as it told the rest of the world it didn't, and as Congress was passing laws to ban torture

In a long investigative piece, the Times digs up two classified opinions issued by the department under Gonzales' reign to prove it.

The first, issued soon after Gonzales' arrival as attorney general in 2005, for the first time provided "explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including headslapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures."

(That "simulated drowning," by the way, is the technique known as waterboarding: "pouring water over a bound prisoner's cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.")

Meanwhile, the department's official stand to the public was the one it issued in 2004, calling torture "abhorrent."

Later in 2005, as Congress moved toward outlawing "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion declaring that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

If they didn't violate that standard, they at least produced some of the tainted results torture often yields: confessions to crimes the confessor probably didn't commit.

When the C.I.A. caught Khaid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were "haunted by uncertainty." They used a variety of "tough interrogation tactics" about 100 times over two weeks on the man known as K.S.M., and got all kinds of confessions. The problem is, intelligence officers say that "many of Mr. Mohammed's statements proved exaggerated or false."

Reacting to the Times story, a White House spokeswoman said: "Our intelligence agencies legally obtain information. This country does not torture."

Republicans Backing Away From Free Trade

What the heck is happening to the Republican Party? Right on the heels of news that business leaders are abandoning the GOP comes another discomforting poll from the Wall Street Journal: By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy.

Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad fo the U.S. and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favored tougher regulations on foreign imports. That represents a substantial shift from eight years ago, the Journal reports.

But no one gave the Republican presidential candidates the memo. They're all still campaigning on the party's traditional anti-protectionist platform.

Well, all except one. Ron Paul of Texas, who opposes the Iraq war and calls free-trade deals "a threat to our independence as a nation," announced yesterday that he raised $5 million in third-quarter donations. That nearly matches what one-time front-runner John McCain is expected to report.

The GOP's departure from its traditional stance is a bit puzzling to some, but a big clue to what's behind it can be found in this sentence: "In questions about a series of candidate stances, the only one drawing strong agreement from a majority of Republicans was opposition to abortion rights."

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