Hunter writes

You read.

Words will never be able to express my loathing for the War Pundit class, a strain of human entirely devoted towards the justification and glittering packaging of carnage.

I am not a pacifist. There are plenty of times when I wish I were, but I might as well wish to have wings while I am at it, for both have equal chance of happening, and the wings would be more functional. The truth is, I understand war, and hatred, and revenge just fine, and don't particularly think of those that don't as being more enlightened or more evolved: just less self-reflective. One of the deepest veins in the writers whose work has dug and scratched at me -- Melville, Twain -- is a distinct vein of self-aware misanthropy. Something to admire? No. But something true, I think, and the honesty counts. There are those that say pessimism and liberalism do not go together, but for me the entire premise of liberalism is that the jagged blades do exist, and will, and that it is the responsibility of civilization to dull them.

Because I know myself, and I am hardly an angel. For example, the day a certain unnamed neoconservative "intellectual" dies, you can bet your ass I will celebrate. I will choose a mound of dirt in the backyard, declare it his grave, and dance on it until the grass itself begs for mercy. The day Ann Coulter sheds the last layer of skin between her shriveled heart and the immortal, I will buy a cheesecake. If the swelled chicken pox scab currently masquerading as Rush Limbaugh were to be hit by a bus on the way to his latest half-erect premise, I would look up at the stars that evening and raise a glass in silent acknowledgment of the eternal, where the best of us, the worst of us, the trees that shade us, and the pets we all loved as children are returned to to same vortex of gas and dust momentarily masquerading as a planet.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote a metric crapload of words in his life, but the sheer, broken-glass pleasure of writing an obituary for Nixon: I wonder if anything was more satisfying?

Alas, all of them will probably outlive me, at this rate. Ah, well; perhaps before that time I can make sure they dislike me intensely enough for me to feel I have done some speck of good in this world.