The Genius That Is Fred Thompson

The man in action. Maybe he got too used to being scripted on "Law & Order" and now, well, just can't think and speak.

Janice Easley's fury over illegal immigration boiled over Saturday as she confronted Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson at the Music Man Square museum.

She said she recalled a film about Mexicans who wanted to take over California and New Mexico. Calling illegal immigrants a taxpayer burden, she wondered whether Americans could march in the streets of Mexico and demand welfare. When Iowans call up the power company, she said, "everything is in Spanish; it's sickening."

"You are so, so right," Thompson responded. English should be the national language, he told the retiree, and immigrants bear some of the blame for the home-loan crisis. "A lot of them couldn't communicate with the people they were getting the mortgage from," he said.

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In Mason City, he told the audience of several dozen that the 2008 election would come down to beating back attacks on conservative principles.

Those principles are "under assault from a left-wing, big-government, high-taxing, weak-on-national-defense Democratic Party that's just salivating now to get back the reins of power so that they can take us down the road of a welfare state, where the government turns out to be not much more than an agency to transfer money from one group of folks to another," he said.

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"I've had the opportunity to travel around the world, meet with foreign leaders, both friends and enemies, in places like China and Russia and Afghanistan," he said. He named more places in a soft voice, his clip-on microphone broadcasting loud breaths as he paused after each one: "South America." "Chile." "Ecuador." "Panama." He finished by mentioning Russia a second time.

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Thompson's anti-immigrant rhetoric -- which apparently wasn't limited just to those people who enter the US illegally -- came as the former Tennessee senator and Law & Order star tried to breathe some life into his lackluster campaign. His attempt to come across as the "true conservative," came just days after the virulently anti-immigrant Tom Tancredo withdrew from the presidential race, and it marked a 180-degree switch from his attempt to appeal to Hispanic voters at a Spanish language debate less than three weeks earlier.