Three months ago Mr. Vidal the prominent Northern American homosexualist (here pictured) and creator of Myra Breckenridge uttered a few admirably wise and accurate observations which deserve we think wider circulation and may help Mr. Basilio and other members:
"I don't know about him [Mr. Obama]. He's inspiring, but then many people can do that. Even in a vacuum, they can inspire you, sort of. He doesn't know how rough it is. You know, all those things that she [the raucous Madame Clinton] was saying about him, which everybody thought she was being mean-spirited and so on and exaggerating the perils of the Republican machine - she wasn't. These are dreadful people. You know, this isn't real politics. What you've got here is something - a war machine has been let loose on the world by Mr. Bush and he's going to see to it that after he leaves office, the United States remains at war. And he set it up so that there'll be all kinds of things going wrong, all sorts of revenge to be taken. And I think, you know, what is it Tacitus said? 'They made a desert and they called it peace.'
"The [Democratic] Party machinery has not worked since 1945 which is when the United States conquered the world rather absent-mindedly, and we ended up with Japan, we ended up with Germany and we'd won everything there was worth winning in the world. Since then, there has been no plan, no brain to the party, Truman was the beginning of the end and he made - he started the Cold War. That's mostly his doing. And then you had a bunch of public relations people posing as the Republican Party. As bad as the Party is, it's not really quite as bad as these people like Karl Rove, that you may have heard of out there in the Pacific, who was a man who understood how to smear people. He was a merchant of slime. So, everybody was somewhat wounded by his long stay as the counsellor to George W. Bush. So, we are left with a kind of wrecked Republic. Bush saw to it, with his curious little Attorney General Mr. Gonzalez. They left us with really no Bill of Rights any more, which means no Republic. And, we are sort of naked to the world now. And nothing can make any sense because everything is dislocated. Then they trot out McCain, a man who's only distinction is his plane was shot down. Well, many other people have had their plane shot down. He's introduced as a great hero and a great patriot. In a well run military - which we haven't had for quite some time, thanks to George Bush - in a well run military, he would have been court martialled for losing his plane and five years a prisoner, I'm weeping for him. Oh, God, how brave he was! Did he volunteer to be a prisoner? Who knows? He's a weird enough figure and all he can do is babble on and on a lot of nostrums that are just so dated. I mean, he sounds like cobwebs when he speaks."
