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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 ser ies of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized hi s closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the president ial debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Ke rry 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 lit tle freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. 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. I almost felt sor ry 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 an gst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White Ho use. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The p resident failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerr y 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 can didate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 6 0 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 m oment during the entire debate, he vowed, "We have to make America the b est place in the world to do business." Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally h ad to speak without his TelePrompTer. It was a Cinderella story brought up to date in Florida that night -- except this time the false prince tu rned back into a frog. Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his hom e in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that he couldn't come to the phone. He says Bush looked s o scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down." 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 W estern 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. Bu t there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his caree r 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. T here are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. Just ask any candidate who ever ran ag ainst George Bush -- Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain -- all of them a mbushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. 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 anyt hing that got in his way, including the US Supreme Court. They are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in Novem ber. The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what happe ned to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early, and he had no response to "It's the economy, stupid." Every GOP administration since 1952 has l et the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nati on into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixo n comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous "tr ickle-down" theory of US economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow "trickle d own" 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 wh ite male property owners could vote. Things haven't changed all that much where George W Bush comes from. Hou ston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no z oning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby spraw ling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich panse xual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just abo ut anything you need it to mean, in a pinch. Houston is also the unnatural home of two out of the last three president s 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 agai nst oral sex or any other deviant practice not specifically forbidden in the New Testament, including anal incest and public cunnilingus with fa rm animals. Back in 1948, during his first race for the US Senate, Lyndon Johnson w as running about ten points behind, with only nine days to go. And it was just before noon on a Monday , they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and in structed 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 ro utine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wi fe and children. Johnson -- a Democrat, like Bill Clinton -- won that election by fewer th an a hundred votes, and after that he was home free. He went on to rule Texas and the US Senate for twenty years and to be the most powerful v ice president in the history of the United States. Election Day -- especially a presidential election -- is always a wi ld 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. They are not the o nes who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted and the losers are forced to get down on their knees. The slaves wh o emerge victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with jo y and plunge each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with naked strangers who want to be close to a winner. 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 g ame, then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your di nner in public. He came in to apply for a job, bu t we tossed him out immediately. Sloat took him down to the parking lot and taught him a lesson he will never forget." They are terrorist sympathizers, and most of them voted against you anyway. It's like the ancient Bedouin saying: As the camel falls to its knees, more knives are drawn. the numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election. T he time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics. John Kerry looked like a winner, and it e nergized his troops. Voting for Kerry is beginning to look like very ser ious fun for everybody except poor George, who now suddenly looks like a loser. I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professiona l gambler, especially when I'm betting real money on the outcome. Contra ry to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with five points as a recomm ended risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger mar gin than Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about fort y-six percent, plus five points for owning the US Supr...
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