Free Republic

With a star-studded team of certified, dyed-in-the-wool progressive nutbars of every flavor, including Medea Benjamin, Tony Benn, Helen Caldicott, Linda Foley (yes!), Janeane Garofalo, Naomi Klein, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn, Independent World Television is poised to capture the enormous, heretofore-untapped global market for demented leftist raving. (Hat tip: Chrenkoff.) The network is raising a $7 million start-up budget from individual donors and foundations. The MacArthur, Ford and Phoebe Haas Trust foundations and the Canadian Auto Workers Union have contributed to a planning study. In its next phase, IWTnews will build the online community necessary for an international mass fundraising...

Outside the oil and gas junta that controls two and a half branches of our government (the half soon to be whole is the judiciary), there was a good deal of envy at the late British election among those Americans who are serious about politics. Little money was spent by the three parties and none for TV advertising. Results were achieved swiftly and cheaply. Best of all, the three party leaders were quizzed sharply and intelligently by ordinary citizens known quaintly as subjects, thanks to the ubiquitous phantom crown so unlike our nuclear-taloned predatory eagle. Although news of foreign countries...

For the past 40 years or so of Gore Vidal's prolific 59-year literary career, his great project has been the telling of the American story from the country's inception to the present day, unencumbered by the court historian's task of making America's leaders look like good guys at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal's series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC in 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and through his ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across the years. Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own...

Esquire apology heartens Buckley For William F. Buckley Jr. - who waged, with Gore Vidal, one of the last century's more famous literary feuds - victory is sweeter the second time around. Yesterday, 79-year-old Buckley was crowing over Esquire magazine's abjectly apologetic "Open Letter" in the February issue, saying the mag "greatly regrets" including an old Vidal polemic, "A Distasteful Encounter With William F. Buckley Jr.," in a recent anthology. When the Vidal essay was originally printed in 1969 - after the two debaters exchanged televised insults during the raucous 1968 Democratic convention - Buckley successfully sued the magazine for...

Is is the most un-American speech I've ever heard a chief executive give to the United States, and only one was as gruesome and off key as this and that guy is Harry Truman who's being made into a hero because he fits the imperial mode.That's just never existed in our history, that a president says 'Well, I think Im going to take over Costa Rica. There may be some terrorists down there some day. Oh, they arent there yet, but they are planning for it. And they've got bicarbonate of soda. Once you have that, you can build all...

Thursday January 27, 12:09 AM  Gore Vidal Walks and Talks to His Own Beat Photo : VARIETY LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Novelist and social critic Gore Vidal walks slowly and with a limp after recent knee replacement surgery. "Turns out, according to the doctors, that I had been walking the wrong way for all of my life," he says. Some people don't need doctors to tell them that Gore Vidal goes his own way -- all they have to do is read his work.At age 77, the writer known for his sharp wit and unsparing waspishness has given up living...

Daniel Flynn's "Intellectual Morons" serves as a clarion call warning about the dangers of ideology. Flynn won ders why so many public intellectuals embarrass themselves by promoting foolish theories and opinions. The reason is simple, most of these individuals have abandoned rational argument in favor of ideology. According to Flynn, this blind adherence to ideology has led many scholars and activists to embrace ideas that are, at best, foolish and, at worst, dangerous. Each chapter chronicles the background and debunks the ideas of a prominent public intellectual.... Flynn is at his best when dealing with public intellectuals who are famous...

Font Size: Vidal Baboon By Scott Galupo  Published   03/18/2002   TCS  ALEXANDRIA, VA - Gore Vidal is a weird hybrid, an intellectual schizophrenic with equal affection for radical leftists like Noam Chomsky and America Firsters like Charles Lindbergh. In a 1992 lecture at Harvard University, Vidal described the radical half of his brain this way: "I am a radical reformer. The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized by our masters,...

The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule. It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal. When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he...

Controversialist Gore Vidal To Suggest In Interview: Bush and Ashcroft would be 'hanged' by Founding Fathers; they are 'despots'.... Developing...

Controversialist Gore Vidal To Suggest In Interview: Bush and Ashcroft would be 'hanged' by Founding Fathers; they are 'despots'.... Developing...

Here is Gore Vidal, often hailed as the most important literary essayist in the US, a liberal maverick whose languid but always spirited voice of opposition to most US administrations since Kennedy's Camelot never fails to find the keen ears of the European liberal-Left. He was asked on Australian radio about what Vidal calls the "Bush-Cheney junta", and how the Iraqis could have been freed from Saddam Hussein's murderous regime without US force. His answer: "Don't you think that's their problem? That's not your problem and that's not my problem. There are many bad regimes on earth, we can list...

<p>One of the more ironic facets of contemporary politics in Europe and America is the left's rejection of liberation.</p> <p>It's not entirely unexpected. The arch-left's concept of liberation always included government-enforced shackles on social and economic liberty. Still, the language of liberation and revolt against despots was a constant monologue from mouths like Gore Vidal and magazines like the Nation.</p>

Here is Gore Vidal, often hailed as the most important literary essayist in America, a liberal maverick, whose languid but always spirited voice of opposition to most US administrations since Kennedy's Camelot never fails to find the keen ears of the European liberal-left. He was asked on Australian radio about what Vidal calls the "Bush-Cheney junta", and how the Iraqis could have been freed from Saddam Hussein's murderous regime without US armed force. His answer: "Don't you think that's their problem? That's not your problem and that's not my problem. There are many bad regimes on earth, we can list...

ICONOCLAST SPECIAL RANT FOR THE DAY GORE VIDAL & THE MOTHER OF ALL CONSPIRACIES by Denis Schulz Oliver Stone knew his Lee Harvey Oswalds and his Jack Rubys. He could tell the difference between Herbert Hoover and J. Edgar Hoover without a cue card. And he didn't like either one of them. Stone could visualize a grassy knoll before he could see one. And he could imagine a conspiracy with the best of them. The result was JFK, the movie. It was, alas for Ollie, not the Mother of all Conspiracies. Hillary Clinton is more encompassing when it comes...

It's not Saddam Hussein and his murderous thugs Americans have to worry about - the real danger facing us is the openly devout Christianity of George Bush and Tony Blair warns author Gore Vidal who sneeringly described Bush as a "'come to Jesus' kind of fellow" and Blair as "a crypto Roman Catholic and a secret Jesus lover." Vidal who met with the odious Michael Moore and is reported to have either written or was behind Moore's attack on the President at the Oscar ceremonies, admits he met with the redundantly obese producer but denies he had anything to...

<p>OUTSPOKEN ex-pat literary lion Gore Vidal says the U.S. would lose a war with Iraq. "I don't see us winning the war," Vidal told WABC Radio the other day. "We have made enemies of one billion Muslims . . . Whatever Saddam has that might be atrocious - mustard gas, pox, viruses - we will ensure that he uses it." Vidal's opinion is rooted not in military knowledge but in his pathological hatred of President Bush. "As dumb as this administration is, they don't look ahead," Vidal sneers. "They don't know where any countries are. They don't know how to make deals. They don't really know much about anything. There is no plan . . . Now you have people [in Washington] who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil." Vidal, who as we reported a couple week ago is planning to move back to Los Angeles, also blasts the press, complaining, "The media [have] never been more disgusting in my lifetime. Every lie out of Washington - they're out there doing war dances."</p>

March 3, 2003: Why is there so often an alliance between wordsmith intellectuals -- poets, novelists, playwrights, literary critics, journalists -- and anti-democratic, anti-capitalist totalitarians? Not a day passes without a Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, Amiri Baraka, Susan Sontag or Norman Mailer denouncing America. None of these luminaries uttered a peep of protest when the Taliban systematically destroyed centuries old cultural artifacts. Nor did they cheer the liberation of Afghanistan by force of American arms. Even when one of their own, Salman Rushdie, was threatened with death by the forces of Islamofacism, there was barely a murmur of protest against...

Remember the way that rabid, self-destructive, paranoid, murder-list Clinton hatred paralyzed the Right (for a time, at least) in the 90’s? When Jerry Falwell peddled videotapes accusing the Clintons of multiple contract murders in Arkansas (after they offed Vince Foster, of course)? When lists of "murdered" witnesses circulated among the idiot faithful? Who could take those frothing, spittle-flecked conspiracy theorists seriously? But by failing to condemn these excrescences of Clinton hatred, much of the Right delegitimized any intellectual credibility it might have had and probably cost Newt Gingrich his job after a dismal showing in the ’98 midterm elections. And...

Protocols of Elder Named Gore Vidal: Wacko 9/11 Piece by Ron Rosenbaum Gore Vidal once tried to get me to print an alleged secret—a very big secret—about Richard Nixon’s penis. About what has come to be called, in post-Clintonian euphemistic legalese, its "distinguishing characteristic." I thought about this episode when I was reading what might be called "The Protocols of an Elder Called Gore," Mr. Vidal’s attempt to prove—well, insinuate in a Nixonian way—that a secret cabal (the Bush/oil "junta") instigated the 9/11 mass murders in order to increase their profit margins. The Vidal screed, a 7,000-word mega-ultra-totalizing post-9/11 conspiracy...