In all my years of study and opinionating, I have to say the person who most closely reflects my views on history and politics is Gore Vidal. I would join any campaign he were in and fel proud to stand behind him in an Administration, something very rare as I tend to be a lone wolf and majority of one. Here is a excerpt of interview with him concerning the present Administration and President Bush, as opposed to the 'Founding Fathers', whom he holds, would send Bush packing.
I do disagree with Gore's view of John Adams, personally believing our Nation's problems originate in his administration of our Country. Adams didn't just oppose Jefferson, but to the end of life vehemently did so, telling his servants as he lay dying himself, to keep him posted as to when Jefferson died, refusing to pass before him and not get the last word. A man who hated democracy so much as to even refuse to die before a Democrat - then referrd to as a Rep.-Dem. believe it or not - is not as nice or good for American ideals as we grant him today.
The eviscerating points Gore makes with regard to President Bush are worthy social critique all Americans should familiarize themselves with - especially those who are Republicans. We need more intellectual opinion and not the 'my party your party nah nah nah' nonsense from the lesser minds, spliced between '1-800 vote against Micheal Jackson' and 'will the snow ruin the economy?' bytes on the 'controlled media' channels. So here is a excerpt of M.Gore and feel free to comment or send e-mail wahkonta@graffiti.net. Blog On. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gore Vidal.
ARTICLE BEGINS
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Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com


LAWeekly.com

NOVEMBER 14 - 20, 2003
Uncensored Gore
The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the
whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule.
by Marc Cooper

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.

When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a
mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last
standing defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic
comments to L.A. Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in
publications around the world and flashed repeatedly over the World
Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again, giving the Weekly another dose of
his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of casualties mounting in
Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they were last year.

This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American.
After splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past
several decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in
the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and
still recovering from the loss earlier this year of his longtime
companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is feistier and more productive than
ever.

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 contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a
few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the
crew that now dominates the capital named for our first president.

As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between
our revolutionary past and our imperial present.


MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and
Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben
Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future
of the republic.

GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the
other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles — slaveholders and
plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and
powerful family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was
pure middle class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans.
Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked
the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full
of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a
hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote
at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read
for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it
is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this,
properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government.

But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have
in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He
pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people
become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that
they want but rather despotism — the only form of government suitable
for such a people.


But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn't he? He argued that
the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.

Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another
Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn't working. Like
taking a car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot
expect a man to wear a boy's jacket. It must be revised, because the
Earth belongs to the living. He was the first that I know who ever
said that. And to each generation is the right to change every law
they wish. Or even the form of government. You know, bring in the
Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didn't care.

Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he
thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be
to give the people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very
eloquent in his answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any
government of any weight if you think it is only going to last a year.

This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would
probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman
around who said we have to start changing this damn thing.


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?

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.

Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our
accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on
the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not
giving a damn.

Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as
well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already. No one is
punished for squandering the people's money and their pension funds
and for wrecking the economy.

So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No
one wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue.
Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society
whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism.
It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given
us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up
with — even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier
books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language
used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after
terrorists like Timothy McVeigh — how their rights were going to be
suspended only for a brief time — was precisely the language used by
Hitler after the Reichstag fire.


In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves
comfortable in the current political system of the United States?
Certainly Jefferson wouldn't. But what about the radical
centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy
for the monarchy?

Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament,
could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means.
Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the
Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should
govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he
was always a little nervous about his own social station. He, of
course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who
argues that we must have a government made up of the very best
people, meaning the rich.

So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can't
think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove
of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don't think he could endure the
current dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of
journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were
telling Americans how to do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan
today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union of
discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that
overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.


But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious
administrations in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the
national-security state, to LBJ's debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and
Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to
this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per
se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish
Republican administration?

No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first
PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally
made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already
great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist,
and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the
attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be
locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military
tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be
exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place
not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock
in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding
Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they
would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.


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?

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.


Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over
everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We
have despotism. We have no due process.


Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed
under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with
the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't you get
the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over
outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these
small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get
its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what
her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to
other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90
percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will know,
and they don't care.

But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because
there isn't enough money to go around. The states are broke.
Meanwhile, the right wing has been successful in convincing 99
percent of the people that we ‰ are generously financing every
country on Earth, that we are bankrolling welfare mothers, all those
black ladies that the Republicans are always running against, the
ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the
Ambassador East in Chicago — which of course is ridiculous.

And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So
long! People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone
along with that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for
that.


Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next
year?

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.


But Gore, aren't you still enough of a believer in the democratic
instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts
of conspiracies eventually fall apart?

Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have
thought that Harry Truman's plans to militarize America would have
come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the
military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we
know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn't have
thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived
through. But it did last.

But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and
have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be
swept from office. He's made every error you can. He's wrecked the
economy. Unemployment is up. People can't find jobs. Poverty is up.
It's a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly
very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in
power.


You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of
the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more
societal level, isn't there still a democratic underpinning?

No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a
few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last
time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of
the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30
years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.


Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

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.


How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

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.
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