« Gore Vidal » is back in the Empire and telling it like it is, thank god:

‘He said that he can foresee the war going so badly that [the Emperor George II] will be forced to resign or be driven from office. “I can’t believe the speed with which the entire republic fell apart. The U.S. Bill of Rights fell apart with [inJustice Minister] John Ashcroft and the [USAPATRIOT Act],” he said of post-9/11 America. “Preventive war became our national policy, which has not been any nation’s policy since Hitler. A preventive war is about as un-American as you get. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t done it before,” he said. “The worst (previous) example was the Mexican War. That brave moralist, Ulysses S. Grant, who had been a second lieutenant just out of West Point, hated that war and said … that nations like individuals suffer for their transgressions. “I believe the Civil War was the judgment of God on us for what we did to Mexico. God knows what we are going to get for Iraq.”’

— Reuters

Amen, Brother Gore, amen!

There’s also this entertaining tidbit in the article, which unfortunately is given a more prominent place in the article.

‘As far as Vidal was concerned, “Alexander” was a breakthrough work because it treated Alexander’s bisexuality in a matter-of-fact manner rather “than a terrible sin to be punished by Our Lord.” “They are on the right track with this picture because it says bisexuality exists which is something the public already knows because they practice it,” he said. Then he described how as one of the key script doctors on “Ben Hur” he secretly wove in a homosexual subplot into what bills itself “as the world’s most honored movie.” Vidal, who along with playwrights Christopher Fry and Maxwell Anderson were uncredited writers on the film, figured that a homosexual subplot would explain the tension between first century Jewish prince Ben Hur (Charlton Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd), the old Roman pal who turns on him and sends him into slavery.’

(Don’t know who Cassandra was? « Look it up ». For those to lazy to follow the link, Cassandra (also called Alexandra) was the Trojan seeress who uttered true prophecies, but lacking the power of persuasion, was never believed. Sound familiar?