the below is from a recent article on Hunter Thompson, pre-election in the Independent. Thompson is a hero of mine. and his political commentary is always something to ponder... "The first time I noticed George W Bush," Hunter Thompson tells me, "was when he passed out in my bathtub at the Hyatt Regency in Houston. He was with a guy who had come to sell..." Thompson, sitting at his desk in a faded-green dressing-gown, stares down at a plate of untouched food: Danish pastries which were warm half an hour ago, smothered in red jam and melted ice-cream. "Look, I'm not going to put this next sentence on the record. Let's just say that 'a friend of mine' was buying cocaine. I have friends in Houston from all walks of life. Lawyers. Professional men. Bush was hanging around with this crowd of what you might call gilded coke dilettantes." "I remember Bush as a kind of a butt-boy for the smart people. This was in the late 1970s, when he was in his drunken-fool period. He couldn't handle liquor. He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub," Thompson adds, "then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away." Watching Bush face Kerry, Thompson says, "I almost felt sorry for him until I heard somebody call him 'Mr President', and then I felt ashamed. You know what? I find myself talking almost with nostalgia about Nixon," adds Thompson who, as a reporter, established a curiously affable relationship with the late president. "Was Nixon somebody you could engage with, on any level? On one level - football. Nixon understood football. Politically he was adroit, and a sound analyst. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a liberal. And that's saying something, when I think what I wrote in his obituary." "I never thought," Thompson says, "that I would ever see a president worse than Richard Nixon. But he is the worst president in American history, this one. Because he is the dumbest. And because he has destroyed, in four years, what it took two centuries to build up. He has taken this country from a prosperous nation at peace to a dead-broke nation at war. We are losing this stupid, fraudulent war in Iraq and every nation in the world despises us, except for a handful of corrupt Brits, like that simpering little whore, Tony Blair. What immediate message would the Doctor deliver, if he could address the US electorate? "I would tell them that, if George W Bush wins again, the United States faces utter disaster. That the question facing voters is no longer whether or not George W Bush is a pathetic fascist stooge. The question is whether - Bush having already demonstrated himself to be a fascist stooge - the American people like it that way, and see that as their future.