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...