Cheap Date

There's nothing a waiter or waitress hates more than a couple of addlepated geriatrics parking their tight asses in some prime real estate and nursing their free refills for a couple of hours:

When Fred Thompson makes his long-delayed entrance into the Republican presidential race, he will not tiptoe quietly. Instead, he will try to shake up the establishment candidates of both parties by depicting a nation in peril from fiscal and security threats -- and prescribing tough cures that he says others shrink from offering.

In a two-hour conversation over coffee at a restaurant near his Virginia headquarters, the former senator from Tennessee said that when he joins the battle next month, he "will take some risks that others are not willing to take, in terms of forcing a dialogue on our entitlement situation, our military situation and what it's going to cost" to ensure the nation's future.

I'm sure the two geezers left a buck fifty tip, expensed it, and congratulated themselves on leaving more than 20 percent.

But the real cheap date here is David Broder, who fills an entire column praising Huckleberry Fred without asking what tough cures Fred is actually proposing. "Forcing a dialogue" isn't a solution to anything; nor is road-testing empty rhetoric on a doddering establishmentarian. If the cracker's got cures, he should either spell them out ("p-r-i-v...") or stop posing.

Added: Broder, who pretends to be a reporter, claims that Huckleberry spent "most of the past few years on TV's 'Law and Order,' and starting a new family, with two children under 4." Of course, Fred spent a considerable amount of time in 2004-2006 in D.C., lobbying Congress on behalf of a reinsurance company which was trying to weasel out of paying asbestos claims. And collecting three-quarters of a million in the process. Perhaps Broder was too overwhelmed by Fred's man-scent to ask him about that risk-avoiding enterprise.