Stephen King speaks at the Awake the State rally in Sarasota, Florida, about something really scary: The Tea Party. King, the bestselling author of such popular horror novels as The Shining, Salem's Lot, The Stand, Carrie and stories that were made into the films The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, has spoken frequently against conservative idiocy and the military madness of the Iraq War. His political views are thoughtfully liberal, so naturally he has drawn the ire of the right-wing, but don't worry--this wordsmith can handle himself. When he was attacked in 2005 by a conservative blogger as "another in a long line of liberal media members bashing the military," King responded beautifully.
"That a right-wing-blog would impugn my patriotism because I said children should learn to read, and could get better jobs by doing so, is beneath contempt...I live in a national guard town, and I support our troops, but I don’t support either the war or educational policies that limit the options of young men and women to any one career—military or otherwise."
When King was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2007, he had this to say in an interview:
"You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his...wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.
"So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn't think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn't think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture." Time, Nov 23, 2007
Jack Nicholson in "The Shining." Maybe the next King horror story will star the Tea Party.
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