Gore Vidal: 100 Years To

Recover From Bush

By James Donahue

Outspoken author and political critic Gore Vidal told a Madrid newspaper he believes President George W. Bush and his Washington cronies have wreaked so much damage in the eight years they have camped in Washington it will take the United States a hundred years to fix the damage.

Vidal also said the election of John McCain would be “a disaster” and said he thought it would be a “novelty” to have an “intelligent” person like Barack Obama in the White House.

In his latest interview, published June 15 in El Mundo, Vidal said Bush “behaved like a virtual criminal but we didn’t have the courage to sack him for fear of violating the American constitution.” He said Americans “live in a dictatorship. We have a fascist government . . . which controls the media.”

In a recent commentary for New York Times Magazine, Vidal not only blasted McCain as a presidential candidate, but he appeared to question McCain’s account of being imprisoned by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

"Who started this rumor that he was a war hero?” Vidal asked reporter Deborah Solomon. “Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?”

In yet another interview earlier this year, this time with California’s Amy Goodman, Vidal was asked for thoughts on this election year and on the last eight years of the Bush presidency. His answer: “Well, it isn’t over yet. You know, he could still blow up the world. There is every indication that he’s still thinking about attacking Iran.”

Vidal said that “quite rightly, the Bushites think that the American people are idiots. They don’t get the point to anything. There are two good reasons for this, is the public educational system for people, kids without money, let’s say, to put it tactfully, is one of the worst in the first world. It’s just terrible. And they end by knowing no history, certainly no American history.”

When Goodman asked him about his recent book “Dreaming War,” a critical view of the Bush Administration, Vidal said that all along, Bush “was just dreaming of war, and also Cheney dreaming about oil wells and how you knock apart a country like Iraq and of course their oil will pay for the damage you do. For that alone, he should have been put in front of a firing squad.”

Vidal noted that the Iraq conflict is now going into its sixth year, longer than the United States was involved in World War II. “That was such a huge operation on two great continents against two modern enemies (world War II). And (in Iraq and Afghanistan) we’re fighting little jungle wars for no reason, because we have a president who knows nothing about anything. He’s just blank. But he wants to show off. ‘I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!’ H goes yap, yap, yap. He’s like a crazed terrier. And look where he got us.”

Goodman then asked Vidal if he believed in the death penalty. He answered “No. but in their case, yes.”