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Gore Vidal: Hating Bush, Longing for Saladin
It’s lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.
This never ceases to amaze me. Full-bloomed Socialists singing the praises of America’s founders. Perhaps they do believe, with General Clark, that "America was founded on the principle of progressive taxation." Oh, they praise George Orwell too.
Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display — vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity — their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.
The book is then based on a false historical premise; Washington, Adams, even Jefferson, were committed to creating a Republic, not a "Democracy."

Q. Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young America’s two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?
A. Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is corruption on a major scale.[...]
Folks like Vidal could not recognize a truly corrupt society if it took their wealth away.
Q. So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?
A. No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans — most Americans would not think of them as citizens.
Mr. Vidal’s fantasies speak more than he thinks. If people like him ever gain power the rest of us would be shot, or intimidated. We would be "disresputable." We wouldn’t be citizens at all.
Q. Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?
A. No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don’t want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn’t their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?
So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He can’t lose.
Oh, this is precious. If Bush wins and electronic machines are in use, it is a fraud. If Bush wins, and paper ballots are in use, the Republicans intimidated the black vote!
Q. Is Bush the worst president we’ve ever had?
A. Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.
So,not only Iraq, but Afghanistan, did NOTHING to us.
Q. How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?
A. I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.
This moral imbecile salivates at the thought of our destruction, and enjoys the fantasy of an Islamist World.... Our intellectuals ladies and gentlemen.
Posted by: Sorge 2003-11-13
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=21199