Fear and Loathing in the Oval Office
May 17, 2003
“Emptybottle” quotes Hunter S. Thompson in “Killer Scum and Candid Camera”, with this excerpt from “Kingdom of Fear” –
“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. George W Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world.”
- Hunter S Thompson in “Kingdom of Fear”
While I have to admit that that quote (written well before the latest war with Iraq) struck me hard when I first read it, I was even more taken when Thompson suggested that to compare George W. Bush to Richard Nixon was to perform a great dis-service to Nixon.
If you don’t know Thompson’s history with Nixon, all you have to do is read his epitath for Nixon —“He Was A Crook“—probably one of the nastiest things anyone has ever written about the passing of a public figure—to understand just how little Thompson thinks of Bush to compare him unfavorably to Nixon.
“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”
It’s easy to dismiss Thompson as all of the things he unabashadly is—a violent, occasionally drug-addled journalist who prides himself on writing subjective journalism, since he believes that journalism can never be truly objective.
But the astute reader of Thompson over the years can’t help but be struck by something very interesting—beneath all of the brilliant phrasing and harsh attitude, history has proven Hunter quite often correct in matters of both domestic politics and world affairs.
Often enough that when he feels that someone isn’t fit to help screw Nixon’s pants onto him, it makes me sit up and take notice, anyway.
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