In Honor of Deep Throat: Hunter S. Thompson's Nixon Obituary

[Sandpiper]

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

<snip>

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

<snip>

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

<snip>

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.


http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/hsty3080/StudentWebSites/Nixon%20Obits/source9

[hippiechick]

1. Wow, sounds like Cheney's obit !!!

:wow:

[kaygore]

2. And to think that next to Bush Nixon is a saint!

[Goblinmonger]

3. God Damn

I miss Thompson already. What a fantastic critic of society. Without a doubt, he wrote the best non-fiction I have ever read. I can't identify the same in fiction, cinema, song, etc.

[DeaconBlues]

4. the world became a lot less interesting and a lot more ignorant

on the day that Hunter S. Thompson died.

[Gothmog]

5. Interesting Obit

Thompson has an unique style.

[saltpoint]

6. Sheesh. And I thought we played rough here on DU!

Compared to that, we're Mr. Rogers. Dr. Thompson is the man with the brass knuckles.

And do they ever shine.

If somebody can just deal with the coarseness, the language command is dazzling.

We miss you, Dr. Thompson. Come back.

[expatriate]

7. Thompson has it right, Nixon was all that - and more

yet, with the passage of time, and the failure of people who came afterward to learn about the Watergate scandal and all that went into it, Nixon became "a statesman".

Having lived through those days myself, I couldn't believe it when the bastard augered in and flags were flown at half-mast while people in man on the street interviews, who were so painfully ignorant that they squeaked, nattered about how he was a great President because he "opened China".

He came within inches of being ridden out of Washington on a rail, and the damage he did to the country is still reaping a bitter harvest today.

[knowbody0]

8. me too

he lied and lied and lied and lied.........a "statesman" my ass.

[Melodybe]

9. RIP Hunter, may one of the many that you inspired

get to write a similar story about Bush, maybe this time with a paragraph or 2 about the the years in jail, being Debo's bitch, and the open-sewage canal burial that you were robbed of.

Rest in Peace

We miss you.

[bobbieinok]

10. this is the part I especially liked when I read this in Rolling Stone

.... Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

I remembered this as including 'my dog hates Nixon'

this essay was and is an extremely necessary corrective to all the disgusting history rewriting that everyone was doing when Nixon died