Earth to Enemy Media: Fred Thompson is a lawyer.  Has been for a long time.  Successful lawyers in private practice tend to represent a fairly broad range of clients whose particular worldviews they don’t necessarily share down to the last jot & tittle.  Unless they’re “activists,” which FDT has not been, that anybody has bothered to suggest or managed to uncover.

One gets the impression that the “throwing everything against the wall to see if anything sticks” analogy is in play here.  Personally I’m drifting toward the camp that wonders if Ready Freddie’s ongoing reticence about formally taking the plunge isn’t going to become the real problem if he keeps kicking that particular can down the road.

UPDATE: I gotta differ with AmSpec’s Jennifer Rubin.  I don’t think FDT has to wonk out to launch a successful presidential candidacy.  In many ways he’s taking the approach Ronald Reagan did in 1980, and that one worked out pretty well for him, as I recall.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt him to actually, you know, launch.  The tortoise did, indeed, beat the hare, but the tortoise also had the head start.

UPDATE II: The WaPo just won’t let this go.