Interview with Gore Vidal

Yup. Rosa Mariam Elizalde interviews Gore Vidal – as usual, Vidal is quite sharp, and to the point. At some point he quotes Mark Twain as having said “the American flag should be replaced not with the stars and stripes, forget them, it should be the Jolly Roger, the skull and crossbones, because we bring murder wherever we go.”

Click here to read the whole thing, but for now, here are some nuggets…

“A child of five who knows nothing about the law can tell you that 9-11 requires a police response. We’ve been hit by the Mafia. You can’t go to war without an enemy nation to attack. You can’t have a war without a country, try and explain that to an American, I don’t think they know what a country is. We certainly know 80% of them believe that Saddam Hussein that had a country called Iraq was working in tandem with Osama Bin Laden, who was living in a beautiful palace in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s all nonsense. They had no connection the two. But Bush wanted to complete the work of his father, and to show that he was bolder than his father, he would be “Bush of Baghdad” not quite Lawrence of Arabia. Americans think they are the same person, and that both of them attacked us on 9/11.”

and…

“We had a great Constitution, and a great legal system. Only by the restoration of that can we have a country with aspirations and with indeed successes like Cuba. Don’t think I don’t get extremely jealous for the United States, since I am a super patriot; I get very jealous.”

Go on, read the damn thing.