Driving back from the Romney interview at Okiboji, Iowa’s Brooks Country Club, with producer Andrew Marcus and his pal Clay, we spotted Tommy Thompson’s campaign bus parked in front of the Arrowhead hotel. Andrew and I looked at each other.

“You got a camera with you?” I asked. (The Romney interview was shot by an expensive crew out of Minneapolis. They were good, but they were gone.)

“Always.”

“Should we do it?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

So we charged into the hotel and found the Thompson people setting up. The press secretary quickly agreed to interview.

For quite a while, I had wanted to ask Thompson about his cuckoo plan to divide up Iraq’s oil revenue and send every Iraqi a check, “like they do in Alaska,” as he puts it.

Problem is, Iraq is not Alaska. There is no central database of Iraqis with names and addresses. The last census was done in the early 1970s. In the ensuing 30 years, there have been three wars (the one with Iran claimed some one million lives) and numerous migrations. So we don’t know how many Iraqis there are or where they live. What’s more very, very few Iraqi have bank accounts or the ability to cash checks. So the payments, like the monthly salaries paid to police and Iraq Army personnel, would have to be in cash… The potential for fraud is obvious as is the potential for the payouts to end up in the hands of the enemy, through force or fraud.

Watch the video on Pajamas Media’s main page and let me know what you think of Thompson’s answer.

MSNBC linked to the video and picked up Thompson’s other whopper: that he will be shocked not to win the Aug. 11 straw poll held in Ames, Iowa.