'I'm not a racist demagogue, but I played one on TV'

The award for Single Most Stupid Political Article So Far of the 2008 Presidential Campaign goes to Tina Daunt of the Los Angeles Times for Will Fred Thompson's racist role have political repercussions?

The piece, about a role Thompson played in an arc of the 1980s series "Wiseguy," is so dumb that it has little chance of being surpassed for sheer dumbness between now and November 4, 2008.

It takes only a few minutes to find the old "Wiseguy" series on Amazon Unbox. For $1.99, you can watch Thompson's first episode, "School of Hard Knox," where the actor asks a crowd at a rally whom they blame for their economic woes.

"You've asked yourself that same question, haven't you?" he says, standing in front of a banner decorated with a cross resembling the emblem of the racist Christian Identity movement. "When you've lost that job on the construction site or the loading dock, a job you've had for 20 years to someone who can't speak the language but who is willing to work for $2.50 an hour?"

He gets the crowd chanting: "Who's to blame? Who's to blame?"

"Who are these enemies?" he asks the crowd. "Some folks say it's the Jews. In fact, if I had a quarter for every time I heard that, I would be 10 bucks shy of being Jewish myself."

The scene continues. Thompson's character says: "The fact remains that it would be easy to point our finger at the bankers and the financiers, Jewish or not, for the fact that our great nation can't compete in the market place with the Asiatics. And it would be easy to blame the liberal leftist, Jewish or not, for sacrificing our working people on the altar of economic Bolshevism."

He tells the crowd that they have only themselves to blame. "We have been complacent, because we have been gullible, and we have been naive, we have allowed them to exercise their genetic need to dominate a Christian world. So don't blame the Jews for doing it. Blame it on yourselves for letting them."

He adds: "Open your mind and open up your hearts and open up your wallets and accept your birthright to a land of pure blood, pure spirit, pure belief and our divinely ordered superiority as a people."

Later in the episode, a follower gives Thompson's character a suitcase full of money and a copy of "Mein Kampf" signed by Hitler. The actor appears deeply touched.

"Only you would have the sensitivity to know what this means to me," he tells his supporter.

I hardly know where to begin.

The "actor appears deeply touched" by the copy of Mein Kampf in that scene because he is an actor pretending to be deeply touched. Last time I checked, that's what actors do. I'm no fan of Fred Thompson, but his having played Knox Pooley on Wiseguy doesn't say any more about him than... well, than playing any role says about any actor. I don't think Meryl Streep really let Nazis kill one of her children during World War II, for goodness' sake.

(And by the way, it is worth noting that at the end of that arc of "Wiseguy" episodes, the Knox Pooley character was revealed not to be a racist at all. He was just a slick hustler who employed intolerant rhetoric to scam the real racist mouth breathers out of their votes and their money. You know, kind of like the Republican Party.)

Come on, L.A. Times. How does something like this get into print? Don't you guys have editors on staff?