Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I'd like to take a moment of your time to attack Gary Hart. Gary is the very most perfect new Dem self-love hound, and he, as much as any man still alive, fucked the post-Nam moment. Consequently, Citizen Paine sez hate is not wasted, when it scalds this Rocky Mountain vanity case.

Long before there was a bogus Bill from Hope, there was this straight-jawed thin-air New Age Mephisto. Remember him in '72, right there at the elbow of Uncle George McGovern?

Whenever Hunter S. gets too self-glorious, I remind him of his many missed opportunities, that dirty dark year, to Ibogain senor Hartpence:

Hey dum dum, you had the chance to take that creepy ranch house playboy out, and early too, before he got rolling -- but oh no -- you had to ream owly John Chancellor two times more than funny, and spill precious and scarce freak generation attention span, being oh so zany, with the endless set of running gags demonstrating how wildly ruthless that tom tit Frank Mankiewitz really was.

Regrettably I must report: Hunter is unrepentant.

For God's sake, HT, the man forced your own political ambitions off the road! You stated publicly you were eying that senate run in '74 -- he scooped it right out from under you, without even a heads up?

"Hey, Paine, that run talk was pretending and stuff -- I never really...."

Bullshit, pal! You had a johnson for high office. And leastwise, you coulda stopped him dead in his tracks -- gutshot him with fatal lampoonery -- a few bursts of your patented contempt-filled snidery and bald, cockeyed, cartoon lies, and he'd have never gotten a vote from any one under age 35, or a dollar from anyone from either coast.

Well, we can snarl all we want about what might have been. What happened is we got this nasty dearth-decade evergreen ambition machine -- a typical millrun product of the 30's. Got him in our national senate where he could become a model New Democrat, one of the innumerable sons of Bobby K. And all 'cause a legendary zonged-out master character assassin couldn't pull the trigger, on account of it would look like envy.

Hunter, that coulda been you in there -- you, in the world's greatest deliberative body... with Sam Nunn, John Glenn, Pat Moynihan... What a time you could have had!

"Shut the fuck up, Paine!"

You, Hunter, you, not that polyurethane shirt dummy with the 24/7 look-at-me hardon!

Folks, hate Gary -- he's why we're in Iraq and not in a union.