“The humor of the campaign trail is relentlessly cruel and brutal. If you think you like jokes, try hanging around the cooler after midnight with hired killers like James Carville or the late Lee Atwater, whose death by cancer in 1991 was a fatal loss to the Bush re-election effort. Atwater could say, without rancor, that he wanted to castrate Michael Dukakis and dump him on the Boston Common with his nuts stuffed down his throat. Atwater said a lot of things that made people cringe, but he usually smiled when he said them, and people tried to laugh.
It was Deep Background stuff they figured; of course he didn’t mean it. Hell, in some states you could got to prison for making threats like that. Felony Menacing, two years minimum; Conspiracy to commit Murder and/or Felony Assault with Intent to commit Great Bodily Harm, minimum 50 years in Arkansas and Texas; also Kidnapping (death), Rape, Sodomy, Malicious Disfigurement, Treason, Perjury, Gross Sexual Imposition and Aggravated Conspiracy to Commit all of the above (600 years, minimum)
…And all of this without anybody doing anything. Ho, ho. How’s that for the wheels of justice, Bubba? Six hundred fifty-two years just for downing a few gin-bucks at lunch and trading jokes with warriors…
That is the kind of humor that campaign junkies admire and will tell their children…
You have to be very mean to get a laugh on the campaign trail. There is no such thing as paranoia.”
HUNTER THOMPSON
RENEGADE EYE
