“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

Fear and Loathing –
By Glynn Wilson –

Sorry straight news fans. I woke up in the middle of an acid flashback this morning and there’s nothing I can do but tell the story.

The news has turned truly weird anyway in the post-Mueller report world. Democrats are screaming at each other on Facebook like the squirrels outside my window, screeching at the cats for trying to kill and eat all the migrating birds passing through the Oakleigh Garden District neighborhood as spring emerges from the polluted fog of winter on the Gulf Coast.

I coughed and spit out my first cup of coffee as I read a comment from a woman who, I’m not making this up, said Rachal Maddow on MSNBC is her political science professor.

Do people just not remember anything anymore? Have they totally forgotten what Hunter S. Thompson said back when about the death of the American Dream and television?

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”

The talking heads of television news, who still get all their information from newspaper reporters anyway, will tease you and keep you following along until the news turns weird. Then they will change the subject and cover the next car wreck or fire as if there had never been a car wreck or a fire ever before.

For the past year and 10 months they have been selling people on the idea of staying tuned for the day when Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a Republican prosecutor, would save everybody from The Kraken, Donald J. Trump, like Perseus saved Andromeda.

When Mueller couldn’t find Medusa’s head to turn Trump to stone and indict him, arrest him and remove him from office, what is a TV pundit to do?

If the key findings are not enough to send people to the funny farm, shout as loud as you can for the “full Mueller report,” as if a longer version of Trump’s exoneration by the Trump Justice Department would be any more satisfying.

Like they always say about the circus: “The show must go on.”

Personally, I think the Republicans have made a huge mistake. They should never have shutdown all the insane asylums, because by the time Trump is through, maybe in 2025, all the Democrats left in the country will be shaking uncontrollably, mumbling complete nonsense and slobbering all over themselves, in dire need of a safe, padded room equipped with a never ending supply of strong sedatives.

Forget about fighting the “opioid epidemic.” Bring back strong barbiturates like orange ASs and Quaaludes. We’re all going to need them before this is over.

Meeting Hunter Thompson

My morning flashback involved that day I saw Hunter Thompson in person, a crazy episode in 1986 when he finally arrived for a scheduled speaking engagement at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I don’t specifically recall how many days late he was for the event. But I remember that in the days before cell phones and the internet, we all had to use landline phones to keep in touch to be there the moment he arrived.

By the time he touched down and got to the student center auditorium, the room was packed with stoned hippies and drunk Republicans who were determined to compete with each other to see who could act more like the caricature Thompson had become by then. Truth be told I might have been a tad stoned myself that day. In my memory the scene is right out of a Ralph Steadman drawing, or the movie version of one, like the warped, trippy scenes in the film “Where the Buffalo Roam.”

Thompson’s power as a writer had clearly waned by then, but he was involved in writing a book called The Generation of Swine, also known as Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.

He had mostly retreated by then to the solitary confinement of his Woody Creek ranch in Colorado, only rarely showing up for public functions. I know for a fact that he wished he had remained on the ranch and never ventured out to come to Alabama that day. He should have learned a lesson from Neil Young. Why?

Because his appearance was so disastrous that he never completed his talk, never even checked into his hotel room and fled for the airport like a Cheshire Cat being chased by a mangy Rottweiler with a bad case of rabies. I’m sure he never thought he would make it out of Birmingham alive.

This was profoundly disappointing for me, I say only partly in jest, because I showed up with a pen and a reporter’s pad and truly wanted to hear what he had to say and planned to write it all down. Unfortunately, from the minute he walked out on stage with a Bible in one hand and a bottle of Chevas Regal in the other, he was simply shouted down by a series of inane questions.

It was clear that he came with a purpose in mind that day, to talk about President Ronald Reagan in some Biblical sense. We will never know what he intended to say, because he got so mad at one incessant questioner that he threw the bucket of ice — on the stage to cool the whiskey — over the audience member’s head. This set off a melee so confusing and dangerous that the Doctor of Gonzo Journalism had to be rushed off the stage and back to the airport in the college newspaper editor’s Volkswagen Rabbit, which came back from the trip with a broken windshield.

Two years later he did come out with that book. It was mostly made up of about 100 of Thompson’s columns from the San Francisco Examiner, where he wrote about politics and culture in the 1980s, with significant coverage of the Iran-Contra Affair. He predicted that the Democrats would self-destruct in the 1988 presidential campaign, which they did. People he dislikes are described as “money-sucking animals,” “brainless freaks” and “greed-crazed lunatics,” which would surely describe much of the crowd who came out to see him in Birmingham.

Maybe I felt a little like Hunter Thompson that day when I recently had the unmitigated gall to call Special Counsel Robert Mueller a failure.

Mueller Failed

Let’s Be Clear: Mueller Punted, Mueller Failed

Many Democrats are having none of that. They are still screaming at me on Facebook, as if I was at fault for getting Trump elected in the first place and for Mueller’s failure to get an indictment of Trump, even though I am probably the only journalist in the country who has been calling Trump a Nazi criminal and a traitor for more than a year. I have been calling for Mueller to get a grand jury to indict Trump, arrest him and remove from him from the White House for months.

It’s now clear that no matter how many times we’ve heard pundits say the president is not above the law, the president is clearly above the law, since the Department of Justice policy is that you can’t indict a sitting president. The policy is wrong and should be reversed. But there it is.

I am the only one who called Trump a Fascist dictator the day he was elected and the only one who predicted that he would be elected, not just because of a close reading of the polls, but because I saw the mood of the country and how he was able to manipulate people into believing he was their savior with key words and phrases to appeal to every disgruntled deplorable in the land. He was doing this in speeches and on Twitter even before Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica put it all on Facebook with dark money targeted ads.

Now half the people in America and most of the people around the world know Trump is a criminal and a traitor. But racism is still so alive and well, especially in the South and West, that 40 percent of the American people still give this motherfucker a strong job approval rating.

Many of these same Democrats who thought Mueller was going to save us from Trump are also huge Nanci Pelosi fans, the Speaker of the House who, even before the Mueller report was turned in to Congress, came out publicly no less than three times and declared impeachment “off the table.”

Some of those who think Pelosi is some sort of brilliant strategist who can use Machiavelli as well as Karl Rove were also Bernie Sanders fans, which makes this tale even more weird. Clearly many of my fans on Facebook missed that video from Trump’s first signing ceremony when Pelosi scrambled to get in line to receive one of Trump’s first presidential pens. We sat here in the Mobile news room and watched that and looked at each other and said to ourselves, “What the fuck is that all about?”

If in a few years an honest historian ever gets around to writing about this time, I hope they point out to people just how close we came to saving what was left of the American Dream by electing a socialist president. Bernie Sanders had the support of 50 percent of the American people before the conventions in the summer of 2016. He could have beaten Trump, and we would all be living in a different world now. He will never be able to win in 2020, because many of the Democratic women who supported Hillary Clinton will never forgive HIM for HER losing campaign to Trump.

Sorry, Hillary fans. I am sworn to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Dog. I voted for #Her. She lost, and not just because of the Russians and Steve Bannon. She, her team and the campaign they ran must share the blame.

They could have done a few things differently, like showing up with a coherent position at Standing Rock. They could have had a better understanding of the problems of hacking and email servers, especially after they were warned by the FBI. And they could have held a better grasp of the electoral college districts and not ignored key places like Detroit and Milwaukee. They lost because they got 10 percent less of the African American vote in urban areas than Obama. She also could have added the Democrat with second highest number of votes in the primary to her ticket, and named Bernie as her vice presidential running mate. The milk toast pick of Tim Kaine did her little good. She would probably have won Virginia anyway.

Another Lost Election

It reminds me of another election, back in 2000, when environmentalists backed Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore and delivered the election to George W. Bush. OK it was really the Supreme Court, but still, it would not have even been close in Florida if Nader had not gotten those 92,000 votes. We would never have had the hanging chad story and all the recounts. Gore would have been president and we would have already started reaching our goals to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels to combat climate change due to global warming.

But noooo! This is truly a crazy freaking country where people still believe what they see on TeeVee.

Thompson had already declared the American Dream over in the 1970s. But the idea is such a strong one that it keeps popping back up over and over again, only to manifest itself in a slogan like “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s total ripoff of Reagan’s campaign slogan from 1980.

The idea is so strong that Frito Lay salesmen, white men who sell auto parts for a living — even union coal miners, plumbers and electricians — showed up at a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, wearing red jerseys emblazoned with Roll Tide and red MAGA caps and literally cheering out loud for Trump as if he was Bear Bryant himself, raised from the dead.

The Donald Woos the Heart of Dixie, But Jesus Remains Politically Polygamous

And guess what sports fans? They are still cheering for him, and they will show up to vote in 2020, like they showed up at his victory rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan Thursday night.

Is there a Democrat who even grasps how Trump won in 2016 enough to run a similar campaign to beat him in 2020? Now that he has been, yes, exonerated for conspiracy and collusion with Russia by the Mueller report?

I certainly hope so, but at this point, I don’t have that much hope.

The Washington Circus

I do think there are two people in America right now who could beat Trump like a drum in a landslide. Barack Obama or Michelle Obama.

Unfortunately he can’t run, and she won’t. She’s got her life back. Who can blame her?

Washington might or might not be a swamp. But it’s certainly a circus. A person can only take walking along that high wire for so long and then they need a long break at the beach with a strong drink.

Now I need a long, slow shot of nicotine to settle my jagged nerves to get ready for the Facebook shouting match that will certainly commence once I publish and share this opinion column.

I know Trump is driving you nuts, Democrats, but I am NOT your enemy. I am trying to help you understand what’s really going on.

If you still will want to believe the New York Times, which ran a banner headline saying the Mueller report exonerated Trump and a column declaring a “cloud” over the Trump presidency lifted, and Rachel Maddow, who is trying to keep you watching to see the long version of Trump’s exoneration read to you on TV, go ahead and knock yourself out. Maybe it will work as a campaign issue to keep it alive awhile longer.

But please try to remember that it was me who tried to warn you that the jig is up. If you want to get rid of Trump, it’s time to stop playing nice. These are not normal times.

I would love to see the Democrats take back the White House and control of the Senate too in 2020. I would love to see America move to embrace its true democratic socialist-capitalist self. I wish a real leftist could win who would fight for health care for everyone and take on the energy issues to combat climate change — the moon shot issue of our time.

Unfortunately, I suspect it will take another middle-of-the-road, mainstream Democrat to beat Trump, but one who can really fire up a base and raise enough money to challenge Trump’s billion dollar propaganda machine and Steve Bannon.

As of now, unfortunately, I don’t see anyone on this list who I think can do it.

A Primer on the Democrats Running for President in 2020

So I find myself in Hunter Thompson’s shoes in 1988. I was there at that convention in Atlanta when the Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis. I was on the floor with a camera when Ted Kennedy made his speech.

Oh how things could have turned out so differently, and what a different world we could be living in now, if the Democrats would ever get their shit together and stop fighting with each other and howling at the wrong moons.

I think if Thompson had not turned that revolver on himself at the age of 67 and were alive today to tell about it, he would agree with me. Of course I could be wrong. We will never know.

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