Whoever said Hunter S. Thompson was dead?
You wouldn’t believe it for a moment if you were wading through the paranoia and zaniness festering in the mind of Michael Ledeen.
But while the Mad Monk of 17th Street is chewing the carpet at the thought of washing clean the filthy domains, the similarities between the paranoia of a Thompson and that of neoconservatives like Ledeen becomes clearer and clearer.
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The natural conclusion one can draw is at best unsettling, at worst terrifying.
The neoconservatives are the most powerful group of moon-howling paranoids ever to walk the face of the Earth. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have got nothing on Dr. Perle and Mr. Feith. Colin Powell’s reported assessment of them as “f*cking crazies” now seems insipid, a bagatelle among insults. They are dangerous nutjob headbangers who don’t just control nukes – they have frickin’ arsenals of them!
They have transcended the mere Trotskyism of Shachtman; past the enlightened and self-knowing Trotskycon phase of Stephen Schwartz; now, they have reached the pinnacle of their evolution, a dark summit where lies are truth and fear is virtue.
They should not be called “neocons,” but “gonzocons.”
Fear and loathing? You name it, they fear and loathe it. Get high and have a good time? Well, old Hunter S. Thompson could have whupped their whey-faced careerist yuppie butts when it came to dropping acid and dying of a good time, as a gonzocon wouldn’t know a good time that didn’t involve celebrating the torture of Iraqi civilians, leveling the city of Fallujah, or obscene gawping at the casualties of their wretched gonzo war.
Their high is more powerful and more malevolent than any chemical narcotic; they get high on war and killing, as long as the war’s far away from their own door and the dying’s being done by someone else.
They are the maladjusted fat kids you knew who enjoyed starting fires or hurting small animals; they have the pathology of serial killers. Instead of harnessing the rage they feel at their own inadequacies in the cause of their own moral self-improvement, they have unleashed it on not just one nation, but on an entire region of the planet and all its people.
In the twisted mind of a gonzocon, every Arab is a terrorist and every Spaniard a coward and appeaser. Every Frenchman is an anti-Semite and every German an arms dealer. Every mosque is abetting terrorism and every imam is a fifth columnist. Every opponent is an object of scorn and every dissident a traitor.
They do not know the meaning of decency and compassion; they have sold their souls for somebody else’s dream of benevolent global hegemony.
They will hold the whip over America and the world for at least the next four years. There will be no “peace in our time” under their rule; there will be no peace at any time as long as the American public continues to breathe the sulfur of Hades that emanates from the doors of the gonzocon think tanks and the pens of its apologists.
The greatest country the world has ever seen is now in the grip of a clique of paranoids who speak only to each other and who wish to dominate everything with which they come into contact. Possessing at least a sense of humor can redeem any bad man; few, if any, gonzocons seem even to have that tiny saving grace. They’re a bunch of humorless bastards.
At least Thompson was a paranoid who seems to have been some fun to be around.
