I watched Fred Thompson on Hannity and Colmes last night. The more I hear about him and from him, the more I get fidgety about his official announcement. He’s pretty much told us he’s in…just a matter of time. Here were a few excerpts:

“We’ve got to come out on the other end together. We won the Cold War with Democrats and Republicans together and that’s the way we’re gonna have to repeat it in the future…”

Speaking on Iraq and the spending bill: “It’s unprecedented, awful politics….We need to take advantage of any opportunity we’ve got. I’ve got a lot of faith in Petraus, I knew him when he was at Ft. Campbell when I was in the Senate…he tells me we’ve got a shot, we gotta take that shot.”

An eye on the future: “We have to keep in mind, there’s gonna be a day after Iraq and whether we leave there under our own terms or not, it’s still going to be a very dangerous world…if we leave under bad circumstances, they’re going to have a haven down there for terrorists, the whole area I’m afraid will become nuclearized…and if we can’t help with stability in that part of the world they’re gonna help themselves and they’re gonna go nuclear…the whole region is up for grabs.”

Most importantly, he grasps the reality of the War on Terror: “It’s the number one challenge of the century and will be for a long time and all this…overwhelms everything else. Our nation has to have a strong deterrent…These countries that are supplying them [terrorists] should know we have the ability to do a pretty doggone good job of tracing their activities back.”

It won't be long before you see this all over the place: