Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got nothing against Fred Thompson. I like that ol’ Tennessee boy just fine. But I can’t help marveling at the extent to which others get excited about him.

Sometimes, they achieve a sort of frenzy that positively cracks me up.

Compared to a staid forum such as, say, an editorial page, the comments on this blog may seem wild and woolly to some — despite my occasional attempts to encourage decorum. But when it comes to sheer intellectual rigor, this is the Algonquin Round Table set against some other places out there on the ‘net.

Such a place is the comments feature on YouTube. I glanced today at one of the video clips I had posted of Sen. Thompson earlier this week, having noticed that it had already joined my top ten most-watched videos. (It had even bumped my least-watched Thomas Ravenel clip, so Mr. Ravenel now occupies only four of the top ten slots.)

There were only three comments so far, but one respondent had gushed:

For Gods sake Fred!!! Please annouce your candicacy!! We are all ready to support you anyway we can. I’d go along with that flat tax too igloo54! GO Fred GO!!!!!!

My absolute favorite, though, was the one before it:

Love me some fred

That’s it. No punctuation. This literary innovation allowed the beholder multiple interpretations. I assumed it meant, "Love me some, Fred!" A colleague took it as saying, essentially, I’m really loving that Fred! Either way, the tension created by its very sparseness, the fact that this writer is excited beyond the ability to articulate, is what strikes me: Don’t have to make sense! Doesn’t matter! I’m just so excited!

Increasing my enjoyment was a movie that I watched as much of as I could stand last night: "Idiocracy," starring Luke Wilson. I had rented it just because Mike Judge was behind it, and I really loved "Office Space."

It was, after a while, hard to take. But the premise was hilarious, and painfully true-to-life. It was based in the idea that in this generation, we have started reversing the evolutionary principle of the fittest surviving, at least in intellectual terms. With high-I.Q., educated people making a fetish of delaying having children, often until it’s too late, and everybody else fully attuned to a culture that increasingly spurs them to copulate like rabbits, the species is bound to get dumber and dumber.

So it is that Owen Wilson, as average a guy as you could find, wakes up from a frozen state 500 years in a post-literate future, and finds himself easily the smartest man in the world. In that new world, "Love me some fred" would pass as Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, "stupid" jokes do get old very quickly. And… well… some of the hyperbole wasn’t all that far beyond today’s reality — especially today’s reality TV. That made it it sort of painfully close to home. Is a show called "Oh, my Balls!," consisting entirely of some poor schmuck getting hit repeatedly in the yarbles, all that much dumber than today’s fare? I fear not.

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