Marc Cooper
interviews Gore Vidal for the
L.A. Weekly. As usual, Vidal is fabulously contemptuous of the Bush cabal, and he calls out the US political process for what it is -- utterly corrupt.
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.
Read the full interview.