For some reason, the recent saccharine gushings of postmortem praise for yet another Dead President, bring to mind this clip from Hunter S. Thompson's eulogy for Richard Nixon, titled simply "HE WAS A CROOK." First published in Rolling Stone, then shoehorned into Better Than Sex, you can now read the whole thing on this Atlantic Online page.

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."