Both the history of politics and television are littered with the wreckage of bad career moves, and former senator and former LAW & ORDER bit actor Fred Thompson is the latest example of that.

At one time, Fred Thompson had a high level of respect within the Republican Party, often acting as a main spokesman for the party while a U.S. Senator, but then he gave it all up for a career as a bit actor on NBC's long running LAW & ORDER series.

Now with no good prospects of winning any primary contests for the Republican nomination, and losing most of his conservative support to either Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, and proving no better than mere 11% national support in the latest Rasmussen daily tracking poll, Thompson's campaign for the White House should be all but a lost cause by Super Tuesday, if not much sooner.

And it's not only Fred Thompson's political comeback that has suffered recently. After leaving LAW & ORDER, the show has definitely become the worst of three LAW & ORDER series for NBC, with ineffective new actors that take more than a little getting used to, and a wasted role for veteran actor Sam Waterston, that certainly fails to make good use of his excellent acting skills in a role replacing Fred Thompson's District Attorney Arthur Branch character in the series.

If anything, Fred Thompson has played a Samson-like self-destructive role in bringing down his own political and acting career in recent years. For a while, it seemed sort of cool to have a former U.S. Senator willing to take on a bit role on a TV series like LAW & ORDER, and it added a real strength to the program. But with his departure, LAW & ORDER is only a weakened empty shell of the program that it once used to be, and the fact that it was only brought back as a mid-season replacement for NBC is hardly any great sign of strong network support or faith as well.

It should be more than obvious at this point to just about any serious political observer that Fred Thompson is not going to win the Republican nomination this year. So why should a perfectly good TV series like LAW & ORDER have to suffer as well? The best thing that Thompson can do at this point right now is to ask NBC for his old job back at LAW & ORDER.

With a blundering campaign of missteps and missed opportunities in his failing presidential bid, LAW & ORDER at least gave Thompson at level of dignity sorely missing from his ill-fated political comeback attempt.