Excerpts from a revelatory interview with the good Doctor of Journalism from late 2004, one of the last interviews he did before he took his own life :
And these Hunter S Thomspon quotes from one of his last pieces of published writing, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail, 2004 :"The presidential election is pretty much going to be a life or death matter for the next generation."
"This Bush Cheney machine in the Whitehouse is the most dangerous situation I ever seen in the country. This country is in worse shape today than I have seen it in, and so fast down the same path… if Nixon was running against George Bush. I’d vote for Nixon. Yeah... I never thought I’d say that."
"The main thing to understand is that Bush is not some sort of likable cowboy, some aww shucks person who is a man of good will. Compassionate Conservative. NO, he’s a front man for a gigantic combine of religious zealots and oil billionaires, and voting against Bush will stop this whole encroaching glacier or iceberg… meanwhile the machine keeps going.
"People are just getting poorer- loosing more jobs, more health insurance, more pension funds. Bush has destroyed the economy in the country, but he has not destroyed the economy of Halliburton, the oil company that Dick Cheney was president of before he became the Vice President of the US."
"He has been a disaster for a president, for the country. He’s been a good boy for Halliburton and the oil industry, that’s what he does, that’s where he grew up. He grew up in the petroleum clubs of Houston, which is a huge power center of world evil. But he’s not good for the country… they come in and steal a trillion dollars from the national treasury in the name of war on the rest of the world."
"The lie is the really that Bush and Cheney don’t deserve to be fired and put in jail, they do. And why he would run for president is and be re- elected is almost beyond my ability to comprehend it."
"The first time I saw George Bush, he came into my hotel room in Houston, and passed out in the bathtub. How’s that for a story. He was drunk. He was not invited, he came into the room with some friend of his who was invited and he disappeared, and the next time I saw him he was passed out in the bathtub, he had vomited on his seersucker suit- that’s a good image. I’ve done worse things under a variety of substances, including drink. But to me that’s the most interesting thing he’s done as a human being..."
"....this country has gone from a prosperous nation at peace and now four years later we’re a broken nation at war, that’s a huge turnaround. It’s the effects of a failing economy- although the war making machine- Christ, that’s doing better than ever, corporate profits for companies that make airplanes, security devices, and machine guns. Their profits are up 200 percent over the year before."
"I think this country is heading into the Dark Ages. I believe George Bush will be seen as the Adolph Hitler of his time. And Dick Cheney will be seen as having committed war crimes worse than Hitler, and they will be put on trial and judged; they’re such religious freaks. What kind of maniac will declare war on the rest of the world? And turn the country into what nazi Germany was."
"Apathy is what got us George Bush. Too complicated, too crooked, politics is a vicious business when you’re running for president. The most powerful job on earth- maybe not for long, but right now, and people will kill, that’s what they do in politics. You eliminate people...."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"(Bush stealing the 2000 election) 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."
"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..."
"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."
"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."
"(President Bush) 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.
Only losers play fair, and all winners have blood on their hands."
Hunter, we miss your words and vicious insight so very, very much. You wielded a typwriter like a gatling gun.
