He wasn't like most political sorts. He didn't try to be your friend to your face while stabbing you in the back. Casper Weinberger was unrepentant pond scum. He was a raging asshole with, to steal a line from Hunter Thompson, all the morals of a weasal on speed. But unlike his ilk in Washington, he understood and accepted this fact. He never tried to be other than he was -- an utterly amoral apparatchik with a belly so full of hate that he occasionally had to excuse himself at cabinet-level mettings in order to go to the bathroom and puke up a viscous, oily substance that scientists later identified as "pure evil." Only Weinberger could, without even a slight hint of irony, pen a book titled "Fighting for Peace."

Being on the opposite side of the political fence from a guy like Weinberger was reassuring -- it let you know that, no matter what, you were surely on the side of goodness and decency. None of the boys in D.C. today offer this same sort of viceral enjoyment. I'll miss the bastard. He was our own real-life Dr. Strangelove. If heroes are measured by the strength of the adversity they face, then a villain like Weinberger made heroes of us all.