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Hunter was for America in a way that America needs; -- he was for individual liberty.

He was for liberty without restraint - in short, avarice and hedonism.

I'll grant he was a hedonist in the pleasure loving sense. Avaricious? - I doubt he died a particularly wealthy man. In any case why would another mans pleasures or greediness affect you the point of dissing him at death?

I suggest you read what the Founders had to say about unrestrained human nature. The chaos of unlimited human appetite leads to anarchy and will surely lead to more government control.

I suspect I've read, [and understood] far more about what our founders hoped to accomplish with our Constitutional system that you.. They were far more concerned with insuring individual freedoms than with controlling them.

HST never knew a moment of moderation or self-control in his life. Mistaking a dissipated hedonist for a champion of liberty is something you need to rethink - IMHO.

I've never mistook Hunter as a 'champion'; -- he just fought the good fight against control freaks his whole life.
That he loved liberty, and wrote about it well was enough for me.

Booze, drugs, weapons, international travel, fortified compounds and a place in jet-set society all take money. HST was hardly a homebody content with the wife's apple pie. You are free to continue dissecting my adjectives, but I think you'll continue to fail seeing the forest

As far as dissing him goes, I think not. I simply labeled him for what he was - a dissipated symbol of a dissipated generation. Your characterizations of the man, in a struggle against the man, are a stretch too far IMO. You're certainly free to imagine him as a symbol for some kind of freedom if you choose. In a like kind of freedom, I believe that he was a man enslaved by his own demons and killing himself was the final act of a particularly small and foolish life.

If you were the authority on the Founders that you seem to feel, you'd know that self-control and moral underpinnings were essential to their ideas about liberty. This assertion is no mystery. If you believe they would have seen HST as an embodiment of their ideal freedoms, I'd like to read about it.

If you liked HST, fair enough. I did not. He'll rest no easier if I laud him or condemn him. I won't, however, endorse, or ignore, the romantic myth that boomer culture has granted him. I sincerely hope his family fares better now that he's gone - he must have been a terrible pain.