The Truth Is Out There...on Page 6

The New York Post theorizes this morning that Hunter S. Thompson's recent death may not have been a suicide after all. It boils down to this: no one saw the man shoot himself, there are conflicting reports from his family about the nature and chronology of the incident, and Thompson was actively working on a 9/11 conspiracy book in the weeks before his death.

Add all this stuff together, and you get a pretty thin circumstantial case. But I must say, it's very compelling. It did seem to me and a lot of other people that Thompson was still full of life, and not at all the sort of guy prone to acts of violence against himself (unless you consider massive, constant drug use to be violence against oneself). Plus, he was still actively working, was by all accounts happily married, and he was only 67 years old. And that World Trade Center book...

Conspiracy theorists make much of the fact that Thompson had been working on a far-fetched story about the World Trade Center attack at the time of his death.

As Canada's Globe and Mail reported, Thompson had "stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations."

Far-fetched, huh? I'd like to get a look at that manuscript. I wonder how far-fetched it actually sounds? Because if it's way loopy, like Thompson theorized Dick Cheney blew up the Towers using his rarely-glimpsed laser vision, obtained from that gamma radiation accident years ago, then we can discount this entire conspiracy. But if it's fairly sensible, or at least not totally insane, then someone get Jim Garrison on the horn, pronto.

Then there's all this business with the gun HST used.

And in his report, Deputy Ron Ryan noted the semi-automatic Smith & Wesson 645 found next to Thompson's body was in an unusual condition. There was a spent shell casing, but although there were six bullets left in the gun's clip, there was no bullet in the firing chamber, as there should have been under normal circumstances.

I don't know anything about guns, but that sounds weird.

The thing is, if these conspiracies were really as shadowy and dark as people think, then they'd work flawlessly. There wouldn't be any talk afterwards about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Thompson's death, because no evidence of any conspiracy would have been left sitting around. I genuinely feel like the government or other agencies have conducted shocking, alarming, dangerous business right under our noses for years, but that the truly nefarious plans concocted by the real twisted geniuses go totally unnoticed. The BS you hear from conspiracy nuts - like Roswell, N.M. or George Bush arranging for the destruction of the WTC - just distracts us from the real dirty work going on.

Or maybe I'm just being paranoid...

Also, is it weird to anyone else that this information appears on the "Gossip" page of the New York Post? Since when are the gruesome details of a man's alleged suicide "gossip"? Gossip is, "Did you see Lindsay Lohan at the MTV Awards? She has, like, totally had a breast reduction. It's completely obvious. And what's she doing with that Fez guy?" It's not "OMG, did you check out the details of Hunter Thompson's suicide? WTF! The ballsitics, like, totally don't match the accounts of several vital witnesses or whatever."