John Brekke points me to a Hunter S. Thompson “Fear and Loathing” piece in Rolling Stone. Hunter’s fevers reveal Bush is a goner, “hammered into jelly” by Kerry during the debates. The article is a weird tour de force, actually a little reminiscent of the magnificent opening to Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” set at the 1951 playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, with Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and Russ Hodges brought together at New York’s Polo Grounds with Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover. Hunter knits together his own amazing patchwork of characters and events to put George W. Bush in perspective: Karl Rove and Hitler and the Reichstag fire, Bedouins, Julius Caesar, Nixon, Muhammad Ali, Bill Clinton, Iraq, and the dark spirit of the Bush family’s adopted hometown: “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.” Wow. “Super-rich pansexual cowboys.” It’s a nice, nasty piece of fantasy. What astounds is that Hunter can still string so many sentences together.
Rolling Stone’s got another item that may be of more import in how the country is looking at Bush and Kerry. Eminem, whom I’m guessing has a bigger following than Hunter Thompson among today’s youth, has some angry words for the commander-in-chief: ” “I think he started a mess . . . He jumped the gun, and he fucked up so bad he doesn’t know what to do right now . . . We got young people over there dyin’, kids in their teens, early twenties that should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam 2. Bin Laden attacked us, and we attacked Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers.” Obviously, Eminem — who says that at age 36 he’s registered to vote for the first time — wasn’t satisfied with the explanations Bush offered during the debates.
Pissing off Andrew Sullivan is one thing. Pissing off Eminem is another. That could make even Jenna and Barbara Jr. jump ship.