Hunter S. Thompson: "Suicided" is now a verb

I keep getting all these e-mails in my inbox saying that Hunter S. Thompson didn't kill himself -- and frankly, there are a lot of unanswered questions here.

"He was talking to his wife over the phone when he did it. You don't just kill yourself in the middle of a conversation with your wife!" one e-mail read. Okay, but maybe he did it that way because he wanted her to feel bad about herself? But would Thompson actually do something like that? And what is all this stuff about his son being in the house and also firing a gun?

Right before he died, Thompson told a Globe & Mail reporter that he was afraid he was about to be "suicided". He said the same thing two years earlier on a local radio show. "We'll see what happens to me if I get my head cut off in the next week by -- it's always [inaudible] who commit suicide right afterward. No witnesses. They have a new kind of crime." How sad. That "suicided" is now a verb -- and a believable verb at that.

Our government has a policy written down somewhere that covert assassinations are a good thing. Just how far are they willing to take this?

But maybe Thompson did kill himself. After all, he did use a lot of drugs. Duh. Drugs will make you suicidal. Everybody knows that even Prozac or Paxil can have that effect. Only in modern-day America can we be having this conversation. What ever happened to the good old days when your grandmother got depressed from living 100 miles from nowhere on a farm in zero degree weather and no electric washer and hung herself? Now we gotta be driven to suicide by "mood elevating" drugs! (Carnahan, Wellstone and JFK Jr. didn't use drugs. They just happened to be on the wrong airplanes. And Giuliana Sgrena happened to be on her way to the wrong airport!)

Who else on the American landscape has been "suicided"? James Forestall? Probably. Marilyn Monroe? Probably not. Margie Schoedinger, the woman who accused George Bush of rape? Maybe. There is always that lingering doubt.... Then there was that reporter Gary Webb who was investigating drug-running connections involving the CIA -- the coroner claimed that he was so eager to kill himself that he shot himself in the head fatally TWICE -- but why would someone hot on the trail of a blockbuster story want to off himself?

And what about Jim Hatfield, the author of "Fortunate Son"? Or Colin McMillan?

Well, there's a quick and obvious way to find out if Hunter S. Thompson killed himself: An autopsy! Double-duh. Did Thompson have gunpowder on his hands? What angle did the bullet go in? Did they find the gun right near the body? What kind of bullet was used? Was the shell found? Was the crime scene conaminated? WAS there an autopsy? And why aren't we being told this stuff?

Conspiracy buffs, let's get ON this one. Why do you think that Thompson might have been offed? Was he about to expose a Washington DC porno ring? Was he going to come up with proof that Bush knew about 9-11?

And how come one of the few top-notch investigative reporters left in America -- besides Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Dahr Jamail, Amy Goodman, Paul Krugman, Seymour Hersh and Greg Palast -- is now dead? Hunter, you gotta come back from the grave, sniff around, find out what really happened and tell us the Truth!

PS: Someone just "suicided" this post on my blog!

PPS: I just want to reassure Ann Coulter, Jeff Gannon, Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch that they have nothing to worry about.