Gore Vidal, 82, has had a long career as a writer and gadfly. One of his outstanding political moments was at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where he had an exchange with William F. Buckley, Jr. calling him a crypto-Nazi (thanks to watercarrier4diogenes for guidance in embedding the video):
There is an article in the TimesOnline today in which he is interviewed about the current primary season and opines about the three remaining players.
As usual he has some juicy comments:
He has known the Clintons for a long-time but when asked about her fight to the finish strategy he responds
"I think her strategy is more or less insane."
..."I’d always rather liked her. She’s a perfectly able lawyer . . . But this long campaign, this daily search for the grail, has driven her crazy."
He wasn't immediately taken with Obama, but has come to respect him
"I liked the idea of him, but he never managed to get my interest. I was brought around by his overall intelligence – specifically when he did his speech on race and religion."
..."he’s our best demagogue since Huey Long or Martin Luther King".
I ask if he thinks Obama has a similar charisma to that of John F Kennedy, whom Vidal got to know because he was related to his wife, Jackie.
"I never believed in Jack’s charisma," Vidal says shortly. JFK, he believes, was "one of our worst presidents"; Bobby, his brother, was "a phoney, a little Torquemada"; and their father, Joseph, was "a crook – should have been in jail".
So much for Camelot. "But Jack had great charm," he adds. "So has Obama. He’s better educated than Jack. And he’s been a working senator. Jack never went to the office – he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him."
But he holds back nothing when demolishing McCain, the NeoCons and all things Republican
" You could beat McCain! I’ve never met anyone in America who has the slightest respect for him. He went to a private school and came bottom of his class. He smashed up his aeroplane and became a prisoner of war, which he is trying to parlay into ‘war hero’."
In his view, McCain is "a goddamned fool. He was on television talking about mortgages, and it was quite clear he does not know what a mortgage is. His head rattles as he walks".
However, in Vidal’s eyes, McCain is just a symptom of the real malaise affecting America today: the cynical subversion of the US constitution. "The Bush people", he says, "have virtually got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus. In a normal republic I would probably have raised an army and overthrown them. It will take a hundred years to put it all back."
..."Those neocons, lawyers, the big corporations – worse than that, extremists – want to get rid of the great power of oversight of the executive. See what they’ll try to do to Obama. They’re crooks. They’re just gangsters. They are the enemy of the United States.
I would love to see him as a regular commentator on Olbermann's show. I watched the Vidal Buckley moment live and it was brilliant. Buckley got so angry he lunged for Vidal. We have few if any voices in the media who are as erudite, witty and literate today.