I don’t really believe it but anything to stoke the fires of McCain hate is salutary at this point. Recall, we’d been led to believe they blamed Romney. Not so, per Fred semi-insider Stephen Hayes:

[W]hen I asked him last spring about McCain, Thompson said he was sure they would remain friends even after a hard-fought campaign.

“If we do this, we’ll remain friends. We’ll be friends after this. But this is, John will be the first to agree that things that we’re talking about here today are more important than those considerations. We don’t have to sacrifice our friendship to do this. If he’s the kind of guy that he is and I’m the kind of guy that I ought to be, strange as it sounds in this whole world nowadays, we don’t have to sacrifice our friendship to do it and we won’t.”

The reality turned out to be more complicated. Several important Thompson advisers hold McCain sympathizers responsible for circulating rumors before Iowa that Thompson would drop out and endorse McCain after that contest. They believe that news reports based on those claims had the effect of suppressing Thompson’s vote in Iowa and cost him dearly.

Did it? That seems unlikely, but could the possibility that it did be enough to keep Thompson from endorsing his old friend?

That’s a reference to the now-infamous Politico piece. He finished 21 points behind Huckabee in Iowa and 12 points behind Mitt for second place. The last polls in the week before the caucuses, before the Politico story came out, showed him 15-20 points off the pace. Exit question: How “dearly” could it possibly have cost him?