QUOTE
Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson sounds off on the fun-hogs in the passing lane
By DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for
it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series
of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his
closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how
many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential
debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry
supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners.
Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of
winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little
freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was
clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for
roadkill.
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey
with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush
went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who
hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry
for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I
felt ashamed.
Karl Rove, the president's political wizard, felt even worse. There is
angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White
House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The
president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John
Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral
Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe -- and that is Rove's problem:
His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front
of 60 million voters.
That is an unacceptable failure for hardballers like Rove and Dick Cheney.
On the undercard in Cleveland against John Edwards, Cheney came across as
the cruel and sinister uberboss of Halliburton. In his only honest moment
during the entire debate, he vowed, "We have to make America the best
place in the world to do business."
Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally
had to speak without his TelePrompTer. It was a Cinderella story brought
up to date in Florida that night -- except this time the false prince
turned back into a frog.
Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home
in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that
he couldn't come to the phone. "The debate really cracked him up," he
chuckled. "The champ loves a good ass-whuppin'. He says Bush looked so
scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down."
Ali has seen that look before. Almost three months to the day after John
Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the "Louisville Lip" -- then
Cassius Clay -- made a permanent enemy of every "boxing expert" in the
Western world by beating World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston so badly
that he refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round.
This year's first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush
that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John
Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But
there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in
the White House is finished. NO MAS.
*****
Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and
anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of
the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There
are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they
call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against
George Bush -- Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain -- all of them ambushed
and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining
about it.
That is why George W. Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore
is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish
anything that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not
by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton
Inc.) controls all three branches of our federal government today. They
are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in
November.
The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what
happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early, and he had no
response to "It's the economy, stupid."
Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has
let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the
nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard
Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous
"trickle-down" theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the
theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow "trickle
down" to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates
than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and
they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white
male property owners could vote.
Things haven't changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from.
Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no
zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby
sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich
pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just
about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.
Houston is also the unnatural home of two out of the last three presidents
of the United States of America, for good or ill. The other one was a
handsome, sex-crazed boy from next-door Arkansas, which has no laws
against oral sex or any other deviant practice not specifically forbidden
in the New Testament, including anal incest and public cunnilingus with
farm animals.
Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson
was running about ten points behind, with only nine days to go. He was
sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a
Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager
and instructed him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a
slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having
routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his
wife and children.
His campaign manager was shocked. "We can't say that, Lyndon," he
supposedly said. "You know it's not true."
"Of course it's not true!" Johnson barked at him. "But let's make the
bastard deny it!"
Johnson -- a Democrat, like Bill Clinton -- won that election by fewer
than a hundred votes, and after that he was home free. He went on to rule
Texas and the U.S. Senate for twenty years and to be the most powerful
vice president in the history of the United States. Until now.
*****
The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too
obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them.
Election Day -- especially a presidential election -- is always a wild and
terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look
forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We
are slaves to it.
Which is not a bad thing, all in all, for the winners. They are not the
ones who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted
and the losers are forced to get down on their knees. No. The slaves who
emerge victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with joy
and plunge each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with
naked strangers who want to be close to a winner.
That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The
Weak will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their
money and all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It
is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game,
then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in
public.
Nobody wants to hire a loser. Right? They stink of doom and defeat.
"What is that horrible smell in the office, Tex? It's making me sick."
"That is the smell of a Loser, Senator. He came in to apply for a job, but
we tossed him out immediately. Sgt. Sloat took him down to the parking lot
and taught him a lesson he will never forget."
"Good work, Tex. And how are you coming with my new Enemies List? I want
them all locked up. They are scum."
"We will punish them brutally. They are terrorist sympathizers, and most
of them voted against you anyway. I hate those bastards."
"Thank you, Sloat. You are a faithful servant. Come over here and kneel
down. I want to reward you."
That is the nature of high-risk politics. Veni Vidi Vici, especially among
Republicans. It's like the ancient Bedouin saying: As the camel falls to
its knees, more knives are drawn.
*****
Indeed. the numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election.
The time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics. That's
exactly what the debates did. John Kerry looked like a winner, and it
energized his troops. Voting for Kerry is beginning to look like very
serious fun for everybody except poor George, who now suddenly looks like
a loser.
That is fatal in a presidential election.
I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional
gambler, especially when I'm betting real money on the outcome. Contrary
to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with five points as a recommended
risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than
Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about forty-six
percent, plus five points for owning the U.S. Supreme Court -- which
seemed to equal fifty-one percent. Nobody really believed that, but George
W. Bush moved into the White House anyway.
It was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German
Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany. Karl Rove
is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked, for a while,
and it was sure as hell fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of
oil, the whole world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal
biphetamine and stay awake for eight or nine days in a row with his maps &
his bombers & his dope-addled general staff.
They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for War -- as long as you
are winning -- and Hitler thought he was King of the Hill forever. He had
created a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. The new
Hitler youth loved to march and sing songs in unison and dance naked at
night for the generals. They were fanatics.
That was sixty-six years ago, far back in ancient history, and things are
not much different today. We still love War.
George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country
from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at
war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're
not. Love it or leave it.
*****
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the
future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and
war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond
our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond
our ability to bridge them. . . .
Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a
practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the
profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)
Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like
George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?
If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal"
candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but
what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs
from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White
House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the
once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise
up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the
White House on November 2nd.
Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it
anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he
stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the
evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.
You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a
gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around
in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat
suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him.
Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just
for laughs.
*****
Even the Fun-hog vote has started to swing for John Kerry, and that is a
hard bloc to move. Only a fool would try to run for president without the
enthusiastic support of the Fun-hog vote. It is huge, and always
available, but they will never be lured into a voting booth unless voting
carries a promise of Fun.
At least thirty-three percent of all eligible voters in this country are
confessed Fun-hogs, who will cave into any temptation they stumble on.
They have always hated George Bush, but until now they had never made the
connection between hating George Bush and voting for John Kerry.
The Fun-hogs are starving for anything they can laugh with, instead of at.
But George Bush is not funny. Nobody except fellow members of the
Petroleum Club in Houston will laugh at his silly barnyard jokes unless
it's for money.
When young Bush was at Yale in the Sixties, he told the same joke over and
over again for two years, according to some of his classmates. One of them
still remembers it:
There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.
"It was horrible to hear him tell it," said the classmate, who spoke only
on condition of anonymity. He lifted his shirt and showed me a scar on his
back put there by young George. "He burned this into my flesh with a
red-hot poker," he said solemnly, "and I have hated him ever since. That
jackass was born cruel. He burned me in the back while I was blindfolded.
This scar will be with me forever."
There is nothing new or secret about that story. It ran on the front page
of the Yale Daily News and caused a nasty scandal for a few weeks, but
nobody was ever expelled for it. George did his first cover-up job. And he
liked it.
*****
I watch three or four frantic network-news bulletins about Iraq every day,
and it is all just fraudulent Pentagon propaganda, the absolute opposite
of what it says: u.s. transfers sovereignty to iraqi interim "government."
Hot damn! Iraq is finally Free, and just in time for the election! It is a
deliberate cowardly lie. We are no more giving power back to the Iraqi
people than we are about to stop killing them.
Your neighbor's grandchildren will be fighting this stupid, greed-crazed
Bush-family "war" against the whole Islamic world for the rest of their
lives, if John Kerry is not elected to be the new President of the United
States in November.
The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and
more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want
it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to
nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime
Change.
Some people say that George Bush should be run down and sacrificed to the
Rat gods. But not me. No. I say it would be a lot easier to just vote the
bastard out of office on November 2nd.
*****
BULLETIN
KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSMENT; DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH
"THE SYPHILLIS PRESIDENT"
"Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis,"
the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near
his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for
a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything we
stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."
Thompson, long known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts,
went on to denounce Ralph Nader as "a worthless Judas Goat with no moral
compass."
"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do
everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer,
to help him be the next President of the United States."
*****
Which is true. I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of
course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a
good man with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's
friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old
acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all
over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all
down with him.
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son
out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no
particular order, and he is no fun at all.
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but I will not make that mistake again.
The joke is over for Nader. He was funny once, but now he belongs to the
dead. There is nothing funny about helping George Bush win Florida again.
Nader is a fool, and so is anybody who votes for him in November -- with
the obvious exception of professional Republicans who have paid big money
to turn poor Ralph into a world-famous Judas Goat.
Nader has become so desperate and crazed that he's stooped to paying
homeless people to gather signatures to get him on the ballot. In
Pennsylvania, the petitions he submitted contained tens of thousands of
phony signatures, including Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse and John Kerry.
A judge dumped Ralph from the ballot there, saying the forms were "rife
with forgeries" and calling it "the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise
ever perpetrated upon this court."
But they will keep his name on the ballot in the long-suffering Hurricane
State, which is ruled by the President's younger brother, Jeb, who also
wants to be the next President of the United States. In 2000, when they
sent Jim Baker down to Florida, I knew it was all over. The fix was in. In
that election, 97,488 people voted for Nader in Florida, and Gore lost the
state by 537 votes. You don't have to be from Texas to understand the
moral of that story. It's like being out-coached in the Super Bowl. There
are no rules in the passing lane. Only losers play fair, and all winners
have blood on their hands.
*****
Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, I had a
quick little rendezvous with him on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen,
Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet with a harem of wealthy campaign
contributors. As we rode to the event, I told him that Bush's vicious
goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and
blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn't.
Kerry quickly suggested that I might make a good running mate, and we
reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.
That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street
in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was
trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the
president's lawn.
We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us.
We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were
stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard
Nixon -- which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun.
We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.
That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while
it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the
White House.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson sounds off on the fun-hogs in the passing lane
By DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for
it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series
of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his
closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how
many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential
debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry
supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners.
Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of
winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little
freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was
clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for
roadkill.
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey
with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush
went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who
hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry
for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I
felt ashamed.
Karl Rove, the president's political wizard, felt even worse. There is
angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White
House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The
president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John
Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral
Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe -- and that is Rove's problem:
His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front
of 60 million voters.
That is an unacceptable failure for hardballers like Rove and Dick Cheney.
On the undercard in Cleveland against John Edwards, Cheney came across as
the cruel and sinister uberboss of Halliburton. In his only honest moment
during the entire debate, he vowed, "We have to make America the best
place in the world to do business."
Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally
had to speak without his TelePrompTer. It was a Cinderella story brought
up to date in Florida that night -- except this time the false prince
turned back into a frog.
Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home
in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that
he couldn't come to the phone. "The debate really cracked him up," he
chuckled. "The champ loves a good ass-whuppin'. He says Bush looked so
scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down."
Ali has seen that look before. Almost three months to the day after John
Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the "Louisville Lip" -- then
Cassius Clay -- made a permanent enemy of every "boxing expert" in the
Western world by beating World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston so badly
that he refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round.
This year's first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush
that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John
Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But
there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in
the White House is finished. NO MAS.
*****
Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and
anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of
the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There
are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they
call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against
George Bush -- Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain -- all of them ambushed
and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining
about it.
That is why George W. Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore
is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish
anything that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not
by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton
Inc.) controls all three branches of our federal government today. They
are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in
November.
The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what
happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early, and he had no
response to "It's the economy, stupid."
Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has
let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the
nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard
Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous
"trickle-down" theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the
theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow "trickle
down" to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates
than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and
they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white
male property owners could vote.
Things haven't changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from.
Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no
zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby
sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich
pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just
about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.
Houston is also the unnatural home of two out of the last three presidents
of the United States of America, for good or ill. The other one was a
handsome, sex-crazed boy from next-door Arkansas, which has no laws
against oral sex or any other deviant practice not specifically forbidden
in the New Testament, including anal incest and public cunnilingus with
farm animals.
Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson
was running about ten points behind, with only nine days to go. He was
sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a
Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager
and instructed him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a
slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having
routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his
wife and children.
His campaign manager was shocked. "We can't say that, Lyndon," he
supposedly said. "You know it's not true."
"Of course it's not true!" Johnson barked at him. "But let's make the
bastard deny it!"
Johnson -- a Democrat, like Bill Clinton -- won that election by fewer
than a hundred votes, and after that he was home free. He went on to rule
Texas and the U.S. Senate for twenty years and to be the most powerful
vice president in the history of the United States. Until now.
*****
The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too
obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them.
Election Day -- especially a presidential election -- is always a wild and
terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look
forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We
are slaves to it.
Which is not a bad thing, all in all, for the winners. They are not the
ones who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted
and the losers are forced to get down on their knees. No. The slaves who
emerge victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with joy
and plunge each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with
naked strangers who want to be close to a winner.
That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The
Weak will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their
money and all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It
is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game,
then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in
public.
Nobody wants to hire a loser. Right? They stink of doom and defeat.
"What is that horrible smell in the office, Tex? It's making me sick."
"That is the smell of a Loser, Senator. He came in to apply for a job, but
we tossed him out immediately. Sgt. Sloat took him down to the parking lot
and taught him a lesson he will never forget."
"Good work, Tex. And how are you coming with my new Enemies List? I want
them all locked up. They are scum."
"We will punish them brutally. They are terrorist sympathizers, and most
of them voted against you anyway. I hate those bastards."
"Thank you, Sloat. You are a faithful servant. Come over here and kneel
down. I want to reward you."
That is the nature of high-risk politics. Veni Vidi Vici, especially among
Republicans. It's like the ancient Bedouin saying: As the camel falls to
its knees, more knives are drawn.
*****
Indeed. the numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election.
The time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics. That's
exactly what the debates did. John Kerry looked like a winner, and it
energized his troops. Voting for Kerry is beginning to look like very
serious fun for everybody except poor George, who now suddenly looks like
a loser.
That is fatal in a presidential election.
I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional
gambler, especially when I'm betting real money on the outcome. Contrary
to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with five points as a recommended
risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than
Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about forty-six
percent, plus five points for owning the U.S. Supreme Court -- which
seemed to equal fifty-one percent. Nobody really believed that, but George
W. Bush moved into the White House anyway.
It was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German
Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany. Karl Rove
is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked, for a while,
and it was sure as hell fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of
oil, the whole world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal
biphetamine and stay awake for eight or nine days in a row with his maps &
his bombers & his dope-addled general staff.
They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for War -- as long as you
are winning -- and Hitler thought he was King of the Hill forever. He had
created a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. The new
Hitler youth loved to march and sing songs in unison and dance naked at
night for the generals. They were fanatics.
That was sixty-six years ago, far back in ancient history, and things are
not much different today. We still love War.
George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country
from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at
war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're
not. Love it or leave it.
*****
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the
future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and
war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond
our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond
our ability to bridge them. . . .
Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a
practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the
profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)
Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like
George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?
If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal"
candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but
what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs
from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White
House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the
once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise
up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the
White House on November 2nd.
Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it
anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he
stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the
evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.
You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a
gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around
in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat
suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him.
Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just
for laughs.
*****
Even the Fun-hog vote has started to swing for John Kerry, and that is a
hard bloc to move. Only a fool would try to run for president without the
enthusiastic support of the Fun-hog vote. It is huge, and always
available, but they will never be lured into a voting booth unless voting
carries a promise of Fun.
At least thirty-three percent of all eligible voters in this country are
confessed Fun-hogs, who will cave into any temptation they stumble on.
They have always hated George Bush, but until now they had never made the
connection between hating George Bush and voting for John Kerry.
The Fun-hogs are starving for anything they can laugh with, instead of at.
But George Bush is not funny. Nobody except fellow members of the
Petroleum Club in Houston will laugh at his silly barnyard jokes unless
it's for money.
When young Bush was at Yale in the Sixties, he told the same joke over and
over again for two years, according to some of his classmates. One of them
still remembers it:
There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.
"It was horrible to hear him tell it," said the classmate, who spoke only
on condition of anonymity. He lifted his shirt and showed me a scar on his
back put there by young George. "He burned this into my flesh with a
red-hot poker," he said solemnly, "and I have hated him ever since. That
jackass was born cruel. He burned me in the back while I was blindfolded.
This scar will be with me forever."
There is nothing new or secret about that story. It ran on the front page
of the Yale Daily News and caused a nasty scandal for a few weeks, but
nobody was ever expelled for it. George did his first cover-up job. And he
liked it.
*****
I watch three or four frantic network-news bulletins about Iraq every day,
and it is all just fraudulent Pentagon propaganda, the absolute opposite
of what it says: u.s. transfers sovereignty to iraqi interim "government."
Hot damn! Iraq is finally Free, and just in time for the election! It is a
deliberate cowardly lie. We are no more giving power back to the Iraqi
people than we are about to stop killing them.
Your neighbor's grandchildren will be fighting this stupid, greed-crazed
Bush-family "war" against the whole Islamic world for the rest of their
lives, if John Kerry is not elected to be the new President of the United
States in November.
The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and
more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want
it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to
nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime
Change.
Some people say that George Bush should be run down and sacrificed to the
Rat gods. But not me. No. I say it would be a lot easier to just vote the
bastard out of office on November 2nd.
*****
BULLETIN
KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSMENT; DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH
"THE SYPHILLIS PRESIDENT"
"Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis,"
the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near
his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for
a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything we
stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."
Thompson, long known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts,
went on to denounce Ralph Nader as "a worthless Judas Goat with no moral
compass."
"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do
everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer,
to help him be the next President of the United States."
*****
Which is true. I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of
course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a
good man with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's
friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old
acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all
over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all
down with him.
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son
out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no
particular order, and he is no fun at all.
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but I will not make that mistake again.
The joke is over for Nader. He was funny once, but now he belongs to the
dead. There is nothing funny about helping George Bush win Florida again.
Nader is a fool, and so is anybody who votes for him in November -- with
the obvious exception of professional Republicans who have paid big money
to turn poor Ralph into a world-famous Judas Goat.
Nader has become so desperate and crazed that he's stooped to paying
homeless people to gather signatures to get him on the ballot. In
Pennsylvania, the petitions he submitted contained tens of thousands of
phony signatures, including Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse and John Kerry.
A judge dumped Ralph from the ballot there, saying the forms were "rife
with forgeries" and calling it "the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise
ever perpetrated upon this court."
But they will keep his name on the ballot in the long-suffering Hurricane
State, which is ruled by the President's younger brother, Jeb, who also
wants to be the next President of the United States. In 2000, when they
sent Jim Baker down to Florida, I knew it was all over. The fix was in. In
that election, 97,488 people voted for Nader in Florida, and Gore lost the
state by 537 votes. You don't have to be from Texas to understand the
moral of that story. It's like being out-coached in the Super Bowl. There
are no rules in the passing lane. Only losers play fair, and all winners
have blood on their hands.
*****
Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, I had a
quick little rendezvous with him on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen,
Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet with a harem of wealthy campaign
contributors. As we rode to the event, I told him that Bush's vicious
goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and
blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn't.
Kerry quickly suggested that I might make a good running mate, and we
reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.
That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street
in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was
trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the
president's lawn.
We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us.
We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were
stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard
Nixon -- which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun.
We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.
That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while
it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the
White House.
Kerry is currently trading at 2.38 on Betfair.
I've put £70 down.
