Posted on 08/02/2011 9:58:53 PM PDT by vbmoneyspender
Hunter S. Thompson never wised up to the hypocrisy of Democrats or the dangers of utopian dreams. Perhaps we could blame the War on Drugs, which criminalized Thompson’s preferred lifestyle. But I think his instinctive loathing of all things Republican was really hereditary.
At rock bottom, Hunter S. Thompson was a Kentucky Democrat, with the fierce born-and-bred partisanship of a ”Yellow Dog.” And I know the breed well, having been one myself.
This is a phenomenon I’ve struggled to explain to my Young Republican friends. I grew up in the Georgia of Jimmy Carter and Sam Nunn, a place where no Republican had been elected since Reconstruction, and it wasn’t until Bill Clinton signed the so-called “assault weapons” ban that I resolved to vote Republican for the first time in my life.
Something else about that big “crime bill” Clinton pushed for, which I didn’t recognize as evil at the time: “100,000 new police.”
It sounded good, and we all imagined these 100,000 new cops chasing down robbers and rapists. But what actually happened instead? At least 50,000 of those cops are parked by the highway doing radar speed-traps, issuing traffic citations to otherwise law-abiding citizens merely for driving 93 in a 55-mph zone.
New Reasons to Hate
You might think a notoriously reckless driver like Hunter S. Thompson would have wised up to this Clintonian scam, but his deep-in-the-bones hereditary hatred of Republicans was incurable. And I’ve often wished I’d had the chance to meet the guy and explain to him what I’ve come to understand: Becoming a conservative doesn’t mean you have to quit hating Republicans.
(Excerpt) Read more at theothermccain.com ...
Hell Of A Good Read!
I'm really tempted to make that my tagline.
“I’m really tempted to make that my tagline.”
Go for it!
If you don’t .. I just may! 8)
I never could figure Hunter Thompson. Obviously a man of the left, he called out leftist hypocrisy wherever he saw it. PJ O’Roarke had an interview with him. I couldn’t tell who was who. They both loved booze, guns, smoking, drugs, women, etc. Sounds like Thompson couldn’t resolve his libertarianism with the democratic party, so he blew his brains out.
Many republicans have been and others are becoming independants..
Most democrats do not know that democracy is a lie..
No democracy has ever been democratic..
Democracy was, is, and always will be Mob Rule by mobsters..
He earned a pretty good living playing a professional crazy man, as near as I can tell.
Little wonder it’s a syndicate of thieves....
I think that Hunter was totally dishonest, he wrote what sounded good, although I loved his early works, when I was young.
I read a story about him shooting with SOF guys, and it sounded like he was just writing bs that made a good story.
I remember him saying that they were drinking and that the SOF guys couldn’t hit the explosives tied to the vehicle that they were trying to blow up, and parts of the tale preceding that, and following it, had all the cliches that would put down the veteran adventureres and gun lovers, well drinking doesn’t affect your shooting that much, and the rest of the story sounded cliched and made up, sort of like Bill Maher describing a tea party event and finding every cliche that he could make up to entertain his gullible audience and sound cynical and superior.
As much as I enjoyed Hunter Thompson’s work, I too wonder how much was a put-on versus his real thinking. Then again, he admitted that his writings were semi-fictional.
I too liked Thompson. When I was young and impressionable. Thank God I grew out of that $hit.
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Has it been five years? Six? It seems like a lifetime, the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world. Whatever it meant. . . . There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . . . And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Well, a lot of Democrats think ruling by demagoguery with a facade of democracy, is the same thing as the principled democracy like the ancient Greeks conceived it. Fair plebiscites in the USA would oppose a lot of things ginned up by the “Democrat” party.
Straight out of Liberal Fascist (and regular fascist FTM) thinking. Of course, those fighting the forces of old and evil are by definition entitled to use "any means necessary."
Democracy is the road to socialism. -Karl Marx
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. -V.I. Lenin
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism .-Karl Marx
You are right, of course - but he’s also seeing through that conceit in this passage. I greatly admire the beauty of his writing here, his ability to both capture that intense narcissism and to simultaneously see through it.
With the Youngbloods’ playing in the background during this soliloquy in the movie (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), it is really quite moving, especially for one such as myself who was coming of age when all this was happening.
I’m a native Louisvillian. My daughter’s husband’s grandfather was a circuit court judge here and was known by the lawyers who appeared in his court as something of a tyrant who did not suffer fools or the unprepared kindly. The judge was also very religious and taught Sunday school at his church. He once threw a very youthful Hunter Thompson out of his Sunday school class. The story is something of a legend in their family.
"It doesn’t matter, in this context, whether you’re a left-winger who wants to tax Donald Trump into the poorhouse, or a right-winger who wants to zero out the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.
"At a moment like this, the real division is between Chumps, who foolishly expected politicians to deliver on their promises, and Cynics, who never for a moment expected anything other than a bipartisan swindle."
Guys, I think I just tore up my Chump Membership Card.
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