Fred Thompson on Possible 2008 White House Run

FoxNews: Just minutes after the Republican candidates for president debated in Manchester, New Hampshire, Sean Hannity did an exclusive interview with former Senator Fred Thompson from Tennessee. Below are extracted comments:
HANNITY: Why do you, Fred Thompson, want to consider being the next president of the United States?
THOMPSON: Well, I look at things like the threat that our country faces. Everybody is focused on Iraq now. We ought to be thinking about the day after Iraq. We have a threat out there like we've never faced before. And I don't think the American people are being apprised of it; I don't think they realize that this has been something that's been going on for a few hundred years, and our enemies have another 100-year plan. We have a plan basically to get us through the next election.
And we've got a military that's still in the works, as far as transformation is concerned, to deal with that kind of a threat. We're spending much less than we need to, to face that threat.
I look at things like globalization, the new millions of employees that are coming online in places like India and China that are going to be competing with our people. And some people want to raise the specter of protectionism. We have a tax code that's hopelessly out of date and out of step for our times now, punishes the things that we say that we want more of and makes us less competitive in the world.
We're an aging society, a good thing. We're living longer. Best medical care in the world. But it's going to bankrupt us, our entitlement programs, unless we do things differently. We're going to lose Social Security and Medicare as we know it.
So you can't sit back, and see people, you know, talking their sound bites and going over their list of things to get applause lines and so forth, and see where your country is headed, and knowing what you've got to do for the next generation in order to make it the same way that it was when we inherited from the prior generation, without thinking serious thoughts about what you ought to do about it.
HANNITY: Every candidate has a Web site. It's ImwithFred.com?
THOMPSON: That's right. We just put it up. And we want to hear from the folks and check it out.
HANNITY: But that's one step closer?
THOMPSON: Yes, yes. It's a thing that the law allows you to do, test the waters, raise some money in order to get a staff together, and really see what's going on out there, and see whether or not your notion of what's going on in the country is really what, in fact, is going on in the country. And I think that there's something going on that's a little different.
HANNITY: ... and at Fort Dix. Explain what you mean, the battle between forces of civilization and evil. What do you mean by that?
THOMPSON: Well, it has to do with the need for all of the civilized countries, as I would call them -- that is, most all of them that are not terrorist countries or terrorist havens -- to realize we have to come together. I mean, that's one of the big failures that we have right now, because a lot of people in other parts of the world just don't see it yet. They see us as the number-one threat and really, in some cases, the only threat, when we're going to have to bond together and face this thing together against these forces, because it's going to pick us off one by one.

We've seen our country attacked time and time again over the last decades. Now you see it, whether it's Madrid, whether it's London, whether it's places that most people have never heard of, they're methodically going around trying to undermine our allies and attack people in conventional ways, while they try to develop non-conventional ways, and get their hands on a nuclear capability, and ultimately to see a mushroom cloud over an American city. No country can do that alone and by themselves when you face the global threat that we're facing. . . . [Read Full Transcript or Watch the video of the Interview]

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