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Why?

Because every so often he cracks open that change purse where Hunter Thompson hid a bindle of his special reserve, twists up a fat one in a pair of Tom Wolfe's argyle socks, and eye-smokes it.

Here's just a very little taste of his Rolling Stone piece "Mad Dog Palin", taken shamelessly out of sequence to baffle and delight.

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Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party.
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In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set — who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else's wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review — seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We're used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She's all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It's just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives."

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains.
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Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way.
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It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
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That's all you get; for the rest you have to go here.

(h/t Bill in Exile, which is a Very Not Work Safe site that mixes pictures of gay men servicing each other in various configurations, some astute political commentary, nekkid guys, and interesting, off-the-beaten-path/pre-viral political essays and vids.)