Why I heart Fred Thompson

By Clarice Feldman

First , he eschews the mealy mouthed response to the Libby pardon--arguing, rightly I think, that the President should remedy this travesty by immediately pardoning Lewis Libby.

Then he argues that it's a horrible idea for the Dems to keep trying to reduce the power of the Executive right now:

Amidst all this foolishness there is a serious question here. Considering the times we live in, do we really want to continue to try to chip away at the traditional powers of the president? Regardless of who wins the White House, don't we need a strong president?

And topping off these two winners, he says we need to improve government and cannot do it without scrapping the civil service:

We've known for a long time that our intelligence capabilities weren't cutting muster. It was certainly the case before 9/11, and it's still true in Iraq and elsewhere. Now we have apparently decided that we really don't know if North Korea has a uranium enrichment program to make bombs or not.

Whether it's the Katrina response, the problems at Walter Reed Medical Center, bungled border security, or the IRS and FBI which can't get their computer systems working, it seems like we've lost our ability to take care of some of the most basic duties of government.

Not that this problem is new. For decades, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has told us, time and time again, that we've lost control of the waste and fraud and mismanagement in many of our most important agencies. And it's getting worse.

A big part of the problem is our outmoded civil-service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones. The bureaucracy has become gargantuan, making accountability and reform very difficult.

Three damn good ideas--more than I've heard from all the candidates running for the nominations in both parties and he hasn't even thrown his hat in the ring.

Please, Fred, run!!