Video (10min 26sec) - Part 2 of 4: Legendary Author Gore Vidal on the Bush Presidency, History and the "United States of Amnesia". With a career spanning more than six decades, Gore Vidal is one of America's most respected writers and thinkers. He's authored more than twenty novels and five plays. His latest book is "Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir."
So the coup d’etat comes out of this. They saw their chance. They — Cheney, Bush — they wanted the war. They’re oilmen. They want a war to get more oil. They’re also extraordinarily stupid. These people don’t know anything about anything. But they have this — there’s a thick piece of — sheet of — a thick series of actions to be taken, among others — I think one of them was to lock up every person of color in the United States in order to protect us from the enemy within. It was evil stuff. So they latched onto that. I guess Mr. Gonzales was already in place by then. And that was the coup d’etat. They seized the state. And from that moment on, they were appointing all the judges, they were doing this, they were doing that, they got rid of Magna Carta — I will not explain what that is a second time—and they broke the republic.
Goodman: "How did we get to be so hated, Gore Vidal?" "Well, there are many odious traits that Americans have that the rest of the world doesn’t like. Constant boasting with not much to boast about, that gets on other people’s nerves. The idea that, somehow or other, the whole world belongs to us and everybody should do what we tell them to do, they don’t really like that. Weird, but they don’t. There has never been a people less suited for world dominion than the Americans of the twentieth century and twenty-first century..."
