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In Washington, D.C., there is--or was--a place where Rock Creek crosses the main road and makes a ford which horses and, later, cars could cross if the creek was not in flood. Half a hundred years ago, I lived with my grandparents on a wooded hill not far from the ford. On summer days, my grandmother and I would walk down to the creek, careful to avoid the poison ivy that grew so luxuriously amid the crowded laurel. We would then walk beside the creek, looking out for crayfish and salamanders. When we came to the ford, I would ask ...

When Julian Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadoran embassy, he was carrying a copy of Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State, which is smart advertising both for the book and for Assange’s worldview. It’s enough to make one wonder what book one would like to carry if and when one is arrested. A few years before the 2006 launch of WikiLeaks, an activist hacker even stranger than Assange ran afoul of the U.S. government, in the paranoid environment just after 9/11. England’s Gary McKinnon hacked into NASA computers and took a look around, hoping to find evidence...

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

Moments after his infamous televised dust-up with Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, William F. Buckley Jr. encountered a livid Paul Newman. Newman told Buckley that his calling Vidal a “queer” on national television was the most disgraceful thing he’d ever seen. The actor’s rage was not lessened even when Buckley reminded him that Vidal had started the incident by calling him a “crypto-Nazi.” “That was political,” Newman replied. “Yours was personal.” In the years that followed, both Vidal and Buckley would frequently defy their political labels. Buckley, the supposed reactionary, would often display a surprising...

As a teenager, I remember watching the 1968 televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the two national political conventions and thinking that they were way more entertaining than any of the TV dramas that were popular at the time. Those debates, unaccountably unavailable for the most part since then, have been resurrected as the centerpiece of the terrific documentary “Best of Enemies,” directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon. The film positions those debates as a harbinger of the ideological sword-crossing that has become a staple of TV news. Except what we have now, as opposed...

Bill Buckley was one of the greats and he called it like it was.

Well isn't this a fine kettle and pot? Buckley shot straight from the hip & no holds barred.

Israel-bashing figures prominently in 'teach-ins' where San Franciscans seek a flavor of the Vietnam era Let's admit it - San Francisco is gorgeous, and deserves its name as the capital of resistance to what the US is trying to do in the Middle East. After all, while other places from coast to coast had rallies and marches before and during Operation Iraqi Freedom, only there were thousands "hauled off by the pigs" for blocking the financial district, and only there was there a rally and march almost every Saturday for weeks and weeks until Saturday, April 19. But were all...

Aside from being an essayist, novelist and screenwriter, Gore Vidal was a grade-one gossip, his published writings and private conversation stuffed with rumour and conspiratorial hints. But now, less than 18 months after Vidal passed into history, he is himself subject to the most reputation-destructive scuttlebutt there is: the suggestion that he may have been a paedophile. In connection with a new book about Vidal, his half-sister and a nephew have hinted that he may have had a secret passion for underage boys. And Vidal more or less admitted it himself, writing in his memoir Palimpsest that he was "attracted...

He was a minor figure in the freak show and dictionary of dysfunction that was American culture during the downhill years of the last century. And the more minor a figure, the better. Yet on his death at 86, another proof that the good die young, he still fascinated. You could no more stop watching him than you could maggots in a pile of rotting garbage. Call it the fascination of the repellent. He could trace his genealogical line back to Aaron Burr, the one founding father who proved an utter scoundrel, and he lived down to the name. Let's...

NPR’s Terry Gross was effusive in tribute to leftist author Gore Vidal on Friday’s Fresh Air, airing chunks of previous interviews she'd had with Vidal. She began: “In Vidal's New York Times obituary, Charles McGrath described him as, quote, 'the elegant, acerbic, all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization,' end quote.” And: “As Reed Johnson wrote in the Washington Post, quote: ‘Vidal's revisionist outlook struck some critics as brilliant and others as almost gleefully perverse,’ unquote.” From a 1988 interview, Gross let Vidal unleash a long...

Chris Bram is the author of the novel Gods and Monsters. Gore Vidal was famous for his hates: academia, presidents, whole portions of the American public and, most notably, Truman Capote. Yet he could be incredibly generous to other writer friends. He wrote beautiful, appreciative essays about Tennessee Williams and Dawn Powell. He was a man of many facets and endless contradictions. He achieved his first notoriety in 1948 when he was only 22, for his novel, The City and the Pillar. It was the fullest, most frank portrait of gay American life at that time. The book wasn't autobiographical...

Link only http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/t/story/gore-vidal-celebrated-author-playwright-dies-16901631

Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003, after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.

BASHING AMERICA, GORE VIDAL AND LIB TALKER OPINE: WOULDN‘T IT BE BETTER IF LINCOLN DIDN’T SAVE THE UNION http://www.theblaze.com/stories/bashing-america-gore-vidal-and-lib-talker-opine-wouldnt-it-be-better-if-lincoln-didnt-save-the-union

In an interview published today, The Atlantic describes Gore Vidal as “a sharp provocateur, as irascible and irreverent as ever.” I’m assuming that’s some kind of internal Atlantic-code for "twisted old has-been degenerate desperate for attention": ATLANTIC: In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take...

So it is okay to threaten Bush and advocate killing him but dare if anyone said this about Obama. WATCH THE VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O2ke-AuJkQ

Gore Vidal says he wanted to murder Bush during his administration. Vidal also says that Obama is too "intelligent" for America.

Plenty of celebrities issued crazy statements in their efforts to defend director and rapist Roman Polanski but none went as far as author Gore Vidal did when he labeled Polanski's victim a "young hooker." In an Oct. 28 interview with The Atlantic's John Meroney about a variety of topics, Vidal claimed he didn't "give a f---" about the Polanski case. "Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?"

Plenty of celebrities issued crazy statements in their efforts to defend director and rapist Roman Polanski but none went as far as author Gore Vidal did when he labeled Polanski's victim a "young hooker." In an Oct. 28 interview with The Atlantic's John Meroney about a variety of topics, Vidal claimed he didn't "give a f---" about the Polanski case. "Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?" Vidal claimed "there was a totally different story at the time that doesn't resemble anything that we're now being...