Frank Rich weighs in on Hunter S. Thompson in a column to run Sunday in the print edition of
The New York Times. It’s already on the Times website here. A sample:
Read “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72” — the chronicle of his
Rolling Stone election coverage — and you find that his diagnosis of journalistic dysfunction hasn’t
aged a day: “The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in
America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between
politicians and journalists.” …
Thompson was out to break the mainstream media’s rules. His unruly mix of fact, opinion and
masturbatory self-regard may have made him a blogger before there was an Internet, but he was a
blogger who had the zeal to leave home and report firsthand and who could write great sentences
that made you want to savor what he found out rather than just scroll quickly through screen after
screen of minutiae and rant.
And since it’s funky Friday, here’s a fear-and-loathing poem by Leon Freilich about “the nuclear option,” a
Republican proposal being considered in the U.S. Senate. It’s “a legislative bomb that threatens
the rights to dissent, to unlimited debate and to freedom of speech,” writes Sen. Robert Byrd, a
Democrat from West Virginia who’s been around since the days of Cain and Abel.
THE PRESIDENT SPEAKS
The law’s the law, the Bible states,
Even when it’s nuculer;
The Dems are
anti-legality
While the GOP is scrupuler.
Vox pop, from ancient times till now
Reflecting the Deity,
Proclaims that all the
Dems are damned
To be the minority.
