Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide -- redux.

Here's a long piece by Hog on Ice about the Hunter S. Thompson suicide. ("I guess that if there's anything more ignominious than scrambling your own brain because you wasted your life and you can't write any more, it's having your dead body used by your own wife and son, as a grisly prop in a pretentious 'counterculture' celebration.")

My "Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide" is here.

The other day, Tim Russert reran his old interview with Hunter S. Thompson from February 2003.

RUSSERT: Tell me why you oppose the war against Iraq?

THOMPSON: Well, it seems like not just dangerous but insanely dangerous for us, for me. I don't even think it's our war. I think it's Mr. Bush's war. And I think it's just like they say about the Civil War, that's Mr. Lincoln's war. But it just seems incredibly stupid to go off--here's a man who's taken the country in two years from a prosperous nation of peace to a broken nation of war. You know, that's kind of hard to--to vote for him it would seem when--the people keep voting for him. And that's what baffles me about the American people now.

RUSSERT: You said it appears our nation is having a national nervous breakdown.

THOMPSON: That's what I--I recognize it as.

RUSSERT: Explain that.

THOMPSON: Oh, God, explain that. Well, it seems that I think in a n--in a nervous breakdown, I believe, you kind of seize up and go sideways, more or less paralyzed. I wouldn't want to get into psychetry--psychiatric research here, but that's how it seems. I--the--the utter torpor of the American people in voting for a person who makes them broke, takes away their education and their libraries and tax refun--you know, you got--tax refunds--seem to be wrong with these things, but I live out in the mountains and the woods and that's the way it seems to me. And I've--I've done this for a long time, you know, governed a lot of elections and seen a lot of politicians. But I've disagreed with a lot of them. But I haven't been appalled. Nixon--yeah, Nixon--well, he was fun compared to Bush. He was a liberal.

RUSSERT: Nixon was a liberal.

THOMPSON: Compared to Bush.

"[H]ere's a man who's taken the country in two years from a prosperous nation of peace..." -- it wasn't as if anything other than Bush knocked our prosperous nation off the path of peace. "[T]he people keep voting for him" -- he said that in 2003, so that referred to nothing. "I've ... governed a lot of elections" -- well, we all misspeak sometimes. But all of this was said in horrendous muddle-mouthed speech. I turned it off after a few minutes.