Fresh from his recent threat to shoot a National Rifle Association board member, radical leftist radio talker Mike Malloy has staked another claim deep in the murky terrain of moonbat territory by asking whether quintessential gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson was murdered.
Thompson, notorious for his unhinged behavior and prodigious consumption of illicit drugs and alcohol, shot himself to death at his home near Aspen, Colo., in February 2005. In the near-decade since Thompson's demise, I can't recall a single person at any point along the political spectrum -- even on the fringes -- who has expressed doubt that Thompson committed suicide. Until Malloy did just that on his radio show last week. (Audio after the jump)
MALLOY: We're talking here with Sanchez for a bit more. Yeah, OK, Sanchez, just before you sent the link, somebody in the chatroom gave me the link to the Napa Valley Register ...
CALLER: Right.
MALLOY: ... where the sheriff's department in that county, Napa County sheriff's captain Doug Pike said deputies were sent to the place (Ruppert) was staying after the property owner asked for a welfare check about 9 o'clock Sunday night. Ruppert was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
So, OK, well there's the, there's the confirmation. Not that, not that I doubted what you were telling me, but I, you know, I just am always, always suspicious of, just like when Hunter Thompson killed himself. Really? I mean, did that really happen, Hunter Thompson? Or was it, you know, I get very suspicious of otherwise very intense people who die of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. You understand what I'm saying?
Then if Thompson, a man who'd been on a bender for decades, didn't kill himself, you do kill him? Malloy doesn't elaborate, preferring instead to leave the suggestion hanging. Then again, how could he elaborate when not a shred of evidence exists to support his contention?
A glance back at the circumstances surrounding Thompson's death makes Malloy's remarks look even more bizarre. Thompson, 67, was on the phone with his wife Anita and asked her to come home from a health club to help with a column he was writing." It was during this phone call that Thompson, without warning, shot himself in the head.
"I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and he did it," she told the Aspen Daily News. "I heard the clicking of the gun," then a loud noise, followed by deathly silence. "I was waiting for him to get back on the phone."
Thompson wasn't alone when he took his life. At home with him were his son, who was working in a nearby office, and his daughter-in-law and 6-year-old grandson in the living room next to Thompson's office.
"It takes a real sadist to arrange his suicide so that his loved ones hear him die," wrote Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby in March 2005. "But what kind of degenerate inflicts something so traumatic on a child of 6?" No wonder Malloy prefers to believe that Thompson was dispatched in a shadowy conspiracy.
Six months after Thompson's death, "worshippers of the wild and dissolute drug culture of the 1960s" gathered in Woody Creek, Colo., for a memorial service to one of their most beloved heroes, as described by Media Research Center president L. Brent Bozell III in an August 2005 column.
Actor Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the quickly forgotten 1998 movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," actually spent $2 million for construction of a huge tower for Thompson's ashes to be shot into the sky, accompanied by fireworks. (Apparently to remind attendees of how Thompson went out). So much for those persistent demands from the left that the wealthy are obligated to use their wealth to help the less fortunate -- unless it can be wasted on pointless spectacle instead.
Also on hand were one-time Democratic presidential nominees John Kerry and George McGovern, Rolling Stone publisher and longtime Thompson employer Jann Wenner, "60 Minutes" reporter Ed Bradley, actor Sean Penn, musician Lyle Lovett, and liberal historian Douglas Brinkley, executor of Thompson's literary estate.
The New York Times described the ceremony as the "complete canonization of Mr. Thompson" while the Washington Post touted the "blast rites" as a major event to celebrate the "poet-laureate of a drug-fueled American counterculture."
"How perfect this event was to demonstrate how Hollywood and much of modern popular culture has been devoted not to lifting men up," Bozell wrote, "but dragging them down into a fuzzy world of addiction and self-absorption, and ultimately self-pity. The libertine elite at Woody Creek came to celebrate a man whose creed wasn't about loving or giving or helping or holiness: 'I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.' "
