http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/52/features-cooper.php So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders? No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans — most Americans would not think of them as citizens. Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans? I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.
Patriot Act as crazy as anything Hitler came up with? Um, "Final Solution" anyone? Otherwise entertaining and generally perceptive, from someone who actually knows American history. What to make of this closing comment, though? Gore Vidal is a Huntington groupie? How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out? I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.
Yuck. The use of irritatingly generalizing terms like 'them' in this context (implying, in my mind anyway, the 'us' in opposition), the idea that The Muslims are a solid, Exotic bloc just waiting for their Saladin (and again, this is clearly playing with notions of the Other as opposed to Us, the Familiar...and never the twain shall meet) is no less ham-fisted and dim because it comes from Gore Vidal, as opposed to some right-wing kook.