The race for the Republican presidential nomination has just begun, yet the so-called “top tier” candidates have all been shown to have deep flaws.

John McCain is a nice guy, but he’s clearly off his rocker. Mitt Romney needs to change all of his positions 180 degrees. Oh, wait. He’s already done that. And as for Rudy Giuliani, he’s already bored the public to tears with his self-appointed Sept. 11 sainthood. The next time he mentions “nine eleven,” it had better be because he’s getting mugged.

This creates a great opportunity for a good, old-fashioned conservative to enter the race. And right on cue, advisers to actor Fred Thompson are saying that he will enter the race over the July 4 weekend.

There’s just one problem: Fred Thompson is not a conservative. He just plays one on TV.

Thompson, a tall, bulky sort with a deep, Tennessee-tinged voice, certainly sounds like a conservative. But in reality he’s a sort of Manchurian candidate, if I may invoke a movie far superior to the potboilers in which he has acted.

Manchuria, in his case, is located at 1150 17th St. N.W. in Washington. That building houses both the American Enterprise Institute and its journalistic arm, the Weekly Standard. Until the Sept. 11 attacks, both were known for a rational and reposed approach to politics. Back then, I used to spend hours on the phone with AEI scholars discussing the minutia of market regulation.

But then Sept. 11 happened. All of a sudden the AEI became the font of the most ludicrous of conspiracy theories. The most prominent was the notion that Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack and also had a hand in the 2001 attacks through his scheming with Osama bin Laden. It therefore followed, said the geniuses at the AEI, that we needed to invade and bring democracy to the dictatorships of the Middle East, starting with Iraq.

This was the sort of nonsense you’d expect to hear from some deranged Marxist mind obsessed with world domination. And that’s exactly what it was. The intellectual guru of the AEI was none other than Irving Kristol, who got his training in Trotskyist thought back in the 1930s at City College of New York. The story of how he transmuted that thought into what he labeled “neo” conservatism is too long and too loony for this column. Suffice it to say that he and his son Bill, who runs the Weekly Standard, believe it is the duty of the illuminati to create a mythic vision by which the masses can be stirred into action.

Great theory. Except the AEI crowd got everything exactly backward. Instead of disempowering Islamic fundamentalists, the Iraq invasion brought such madmen to power, both on the government side and in the insurgency.

The Manchurian candidate is a fellow at the AEI, where he cranks out essays touting the party line. Note this passage in an essay on the media:

“I doubt, for example, that our television networks have spent as much time exposing the horrors of life for millions of women in pre-liberation Iraq and Afghanistan as they’ve spent covering Abu Ghraib. For some reason, everyday atrocities such as the endemic beatings, honor killings and forced marriages of women just don’t seem to be newsworthy.”

Huh? The imposition of Islamic law in Iraq and the persecution of women for religious reasons did not precede the “liberation.” It was a direct result of it.

Thompson cannot be dumb enough to believe the words that appear under his byline. Or perhaps he is. In a second essay on the decline of military history teaching at American universities, he asks why students are no longer learning about the battle of Valley Forge. Perhaps it’s because there wasn’t one.

And then there is the case of Irving “Scooter” Libby. Thompson serves on his defense fund and has made it clear that he believes there was absolutely nothing wrong with Libby’s outing of a CIA agent. Again, this is the sort of behavior normally associated with crazed left-wingers, not solid conservatives.

What Thompson represents is not conservatism but a sort of conservative kitsch. Kitsch is, as the anti-communist Czech writer Milan Kundera put it, “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling.”

Thompson, to give the devil his due, has some talent in that area. But the received ideas he espouses have been proven to be so monumentally stupid that it’s hard to imagine that even the Beltway crowd still endorses them. Do leading Republicans really think they are going to win the presidency behind a candidate who argues that the Iraq war is going so well that it’s time to liberate Iran and Syria?

Apparently so. But the 2008 election will be held in America, not Manchuria.