Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Gore Vidal: America is the crookedest place on earth

Acclaimed novelist Gore Vidal was no friend of the Bush administration. After President George W. Bush gave his first inaugural address, Vidal told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman that it was "the most un-American speech I’ve ever heard a chief executive give to the United States." He also claimed in 2008 that 9/11 was "a coup d’etat" to overthrow the government, allowing the Bush administration "[to] make legal each and every breach of the constitution that [they] had in mind."

Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Now Vidal warns the world, "Anybody who tries to hang on to America's coat-tails is going to find himself up to his eyeballs in, well, deceit and corruption. This is the crookedest place on earth - and I never thought I would go that far, having been to many other countries at least south of our borders."

I should not in the least be surprised if there were a kind of dictatorship at the end of the road, which seems to be coming more and more quickly as we lose more and more wars.