Stephen King on Britney, Lindsay, Jenna & Waterboarding

Below, you’ll find excerpts from TIME Mag­a­zine’s con­ver­sa­tion with Stephen King. You can access the full inter­view here. King turns up the heat after the jump.

STEPHEN KING: So who’s going to be TIME Per­son of the Year?

TIME: I real­ly don’t know, there’s a very small group of peo­ple who make that deci­sion.

STEPHEN KING: I was think­ing, I think it should be Brit­ney Spears and Lind­say Lohan.

TIME: Real­ly?

STEPHEN KING: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a seg­ment for Night­line, about [the movie ver­sion of his novel­la] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just cov­er­ing — what do they call it — the scream of the pea­cock, and you’re miss­ing the whole fox hunt.” Like water­board­ing [or] where all the mon­ey went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to dis­ap­pear. And yet you get this cov­er­age of who’s gonna get cus­tody of Brit­ney’s kids? Whether or not Lind­say drank at her twen­ty-first birth­day par­ty, and all this oth­er shit. 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. And then the guy from Night­line said, “Well, obvi­ous­ly you’ve not been watch­ing World News Tonight with Char­lie Gib­son.” But I do — I watch ’em all!