America: “The Crookedest Place on Earth”

That’s the verdict from Gore Vidal. I’ve never read any of his books, but I’ve always liked his interviews and quotations.

He says he was optimistic when Obama got elected, but quickly became disappointed.

“He's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed.”

A year ago Vidal told an interviewer that the United States was “rotting away.” He said America has:

“…no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realize how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is.”

In his newest interview, he said:

“Anybody who tries to hang on to America's coat-tails is going to find himself up to his eyeballs in, well, deceit and corruption. This is the crookedest place on earth — and I never thought I would go that far.”

Regarding Republicans, he said:

“They just dislike everyone. They couldn't come out and say ‘We don't want a black president’ — we've finally got past that roadblock. So what they did was set out to slaughter the opposition party, the Democrats.”