GORE VIDAL ON AMERICA, AND BUSH, FIVE YEARS ON FROM 9/11

Gore Vidal is despised by many on the American Right, not simply because he is gay and outspoken, or a vastly influential critic of President Bush and what he calls the "Bush Junta" - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz - but because Vidal knows American history better than just about any other living American.

He has seen Washington, DC from the inside as a young man, and viewed what he calls The Downfall Of The American Empire from a distance, living in Italy.

Vidal also knows Roman history better than anyone in the Bush administration, particularly the eight or so people in his key circle of influence, and control. Vidal has been warning, sometimes in a droning repetition, that the American Empire has well and truly fallen, starting in the mid-1980s. Now he claims it's going up in flames, and Bush is like Nero, ignorant of the inner destruction, all the while revelling in fantasies about his place in history.

Here's some (edited) Gore Vidal from the UK Independent on America And 9/11 Five Years On :

(On 9/11) The greatest nation in the country, as an American statesman once termed us, was attacked by a dozen or so Saudi Arabians who had, with astonishing ease, hijacked several airliners and flew two of them into a pair of New York skyscrapers as well as another into one of the five sides of the Pentagon at Washington, the heart of the greatest, most expensive military machine the world has ever known.

What, someone asked, was my first response. Amazement at how little protected we were ...

In the last five years American behaviour in the Middle East has been barbarous and will not soon be forgiven.

Meanwhile, the gas-oil junta has hijacked the old American republic through the artful use of great quantities of corporate and church cash in order to falsify the electoral tallies of easily hacked electronic voting machinery...

There is a good deal of grim comedy in the words if not the current deeds of the little president.

Now in an attempt to avoid blame for the Iraq war and further confuse the world about why Iran and Syria must be destroyed Old Rumsfeld and Old Cheney are trotting out dim garbled images of Hitler and appeasement as they pretend that the anti-war American majority favours Islamic fascism.

They pretend terrorism is a demonic person. And if we don't stop him in Tehran we'll have to stop him here.

This is ludicrous; unfortunately the junta is as ignorant of history and geography as they believe the public to be. Meanwhile, the little president worries about his "legacy" in the history books.

But should he get World War Three going there might not be any more history books...

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