Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie

“Bill Clinton would have played the Jew’s harp stark naked on 60 Minutes if he thought it would help him get elected. He is the Willy Loman of Generation X, a traveling salesman from Arkansas who has the loyalty of a lizard with its tail broken off and the midnight taste of a man who’d double-date with the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart.” So writes famed political analyst Hunter S. Thompson in Better Than Sex, his groundbreaking, breathtaking, and escapading saga of what happens to campaign junkies behind the scenes of a victorious presidential campaign – their orgies, their despair, and finally their terror when they abandon all hope as the forces of darkness close in and make them prisoners in their own White House, where they cry out like doomed animals. As he did in such classics as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, Hell’s Angels, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Thompson has again wandered into the savage vortex of political power, and emerged, barely, with this bizarre tale of life within the Belly of the Great American Beast. Better Than Sex drags you into Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood, a world full of fear that stretches from Pennsylvania Avenue to Hollywood to the squalid hills of the Ozarks, where power-crazed monsters like James Carville, Oliver North, and George Stephanopoulos seize control of a nation and wallow unashamed in a Palace of Power where the only governing ethic is raw lust. It is an ugly and disillusioning spectacle, one that only the merciful death of Richard M. Nixon – explored here in all its glorious symbolism – could defuse. Read it and weep, Bubba. We live in an ugly time and Thompson’s cruel struggle with his political addiction is a matter of publicrecord.