Gore Vidal on Bush the Thug

Gore Vidal expresses some opinions in an interview in The Progressive, conducted by David Barsamian. Here are some tidbits—like potato chips, after you bite into one, you want more:

He sees a certain continuity in U.S. foreign policy over the last fifty years. “The management, then and now, truly believes the United States is the master of the Earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown,” he says. “We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.”

“I was brought up in Washington. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.”

“…The people don’t matter to this gang. They pay no attention. They think in totalitarian terms. They’ve got the troops. They’ve got the army. They’ve got Congress. They’ve got the judiciary. Why should they worry? Let the chattering classes chatter. Bush is a thug. I think here is something really wrong with him.”

“The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It’s as though we are evil. We strike first. We’ll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies.”

What is the leader of the free world up to on this Friday, the 17th day of horrible violence between Israel and Lebanon, with which Bush would rather have nothing to do? First he’s meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who’s trying to convince the US president that involvement, actually out and out demand, of a cease fire and U.N. peacekeeping forces is a better idea than just watching the fighting on TV.

Then the most powerful man in the world hosts a gathering of the stars of this year’s American Idol TV show at the White House. In case you think this may be inappropriate while dozens of missiles are lopping off the limbs of innocent men, women and children every minute of every hour while our president could act to help out and end the misery, you’re not the only one:

"It can be tricky, when the Middle East is falling apart, to be spending time with the winner of 'American Idol,' " said Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island. "There's the risk that people will ask, 'Doesn't this guy have something better to do? Shouldn't he be solving foreign crises?' "—Los Angeles Times, 7/28/06

Shouldn’t we be praying for the November elections to get here soon?