FRED THOMPSON QUITS PRESIDENTIAL RACE, CITES DISAGREEMENT OVER SCRIPTS

by R J Shulman

NEW YORK - Former Tenessee Senator Fred Thompson announced that he will abandon his bid to seek the Republican Presidential nomination, barely one week after he announced his intention to run. "I had no idea," he told reporters today, "that the script called for me to actually have to campaign for the nomination. I had been led to believe," he continued,"that all I had to do was show up at a photo op, spout my lines and then take a nap. Isn't that how Ronald Regan did it?"

In the last week, Thompson had made significant gains in the polls, despite his lack of active campaigning. His sudden departure has disappointed many of his followers. "I am devistated," said Angela Weiser a staunch Thompson supporter, from Muscatine, Iowa, "I mean, when Fred says the Iraq war is going great guns, he was so believable and if he were to say something like our country was less safe due to our insane foreign policy and that our middle class was about to be destroyed by corporate monsters, I wouldn't have to worry, 'cause I'd just say, this is only a movie, this is only a movie."

Thompson did not divulge any future plans, but Rudolph Guiliani told supporters standing around ground zero, that now that Thompson was out of the race that he, Guiliani was going to be the official "law and order" candidate.