This week's New Yorker (5/30/00) has a little interviewette with Hunter S. Thompson in The Talk of the Town. They ask him about Uncle Duke in Doonesbury (he's not amused) and about a Super Bowl party Thompson threw in the 1970s, which our favorite Texan princeling attended at just the time when his then-behavior at parties is now of interest. Thompson has this to say:
"I can't be expected to remember what every drug-addled yuppie hanger-on-er who wanted to get close to me during a football game twenty-five years ago digested. There were so many dope fiends milling about, I don't remember what some Yalie named Bush, whose father was a factotum in the Nixon Administration, was doing. But he strikes me as the sort of person I would have thrown out of the room. A rich, beer-drunk yahoo with a big allowance who passes out in your bathtub."
This proves nothing about Bush, of course; we already knew he was a rich frat boy and the "drug-addled yuppie" part is just rhetoric. The point is that it's funny rhetoric, is all.

When pressed, Thompson simply refused to rat anybody out, which is cool.
Thompson has recently been making the talk-show rounds--an incredible rarity for him--in order to plug his newest entry into the literary lexicon: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century. The Doctor has been his usual self: mumbling coherently enough in order to get some sort of point across while randomly cursing; making the guy with the beep button nervous. Aside from one moment on a news show (I can't remember which one) where he paused mid-sentence and let out a shriek before continuing with his thought, the most interesting thing coming out of Thompson's mouth has been pontification regarding the current state of our nation and its leader. In both interviews I have seen, Thompson went as far as to say that Bush made Nixon look like a Liberal. This from a man who is not known for his love for Tricky Dick.

In print, Thompson had this to say about the President:

Let's face it--the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a dunce. He does what he is told to do--says what he is told to say--poses the way he is told to pose. He is a Fool.

This is never an easy thing for the voters of this country to accept.

No. Nonsense. The president cannot be a Fool. Not at this moment in time--when the last living vestiges of the American Dream are on the line. This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the White House. Which is, after all, our house. That is our headquarters--it is where the heart of America lives. So if the president lies and act giddy about other people's lives--if he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass murder as a logical plan to make sure that we are still Number One--he is a Jackass by definition--a loud and meaningless animal with no fundamental intelligence and no balls.

To say that this goofy child president is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon.

Whoops! Did I say that? Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard Nixon look like a liberal?

- From Kingdom of Fear, Simon & Schuster, 2003

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