Gore Vidal- "(Obama) doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is.”

[masuki bance]

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51392SYRNHL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Barack Obama is failing as President and the US is in danger of sliding into a military dictatorship, says Gore Vidal, the American essayist and intellectual.

In an exclusive http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece">interview with The Times, Vidal, 83, reveals that he regrets switching his allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Mr Obama during last year’s campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.

“I was hopeful,” he said of Mr Obama. “He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

America should leave Afghanistan, Vidal said. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” Vidal, a friend of President John F. Kennedy, became an Obama backer because he “grew up in a black city” (Washington) and was impressed by Obama’s intelligence.

On Mr Obama’s plan to reform healthcare, he said: “He f***** it up. I don’t know how, because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.”

Vidal added: "He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ’I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs - a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” He also predicted Obama may be assassinated: “Just one lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital.”

America has no intellectual class and is rotting away at a funereal pace, he believes. “We’ll have a military dictatorship soon, on the basis nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being overeducated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6854498.ece

[willing dwarf]

1. Sorry can't agree

I'd say what we love about Obama is that he realizes how intelligent the American people are and he addresses us as intelligent adults.

Gore Vidae's attitude is utterly patriarchal and hearkens back to an aristrocratic elitist attitude which still has a hold on the psyche, but hinders any attempt at real democracy.

It's just fascism dressed in a slightly less threatening outfit. The stuff of the conservatives. They can keep it!

[BlooInBloo]

2. More or less dead on with regard to the fundamental problem with Americans...

Although I would place more emphasis on Americans' *desire* to be stupid, than the mere fact of the matter. It's that pride in, and desire for stupidity that I think makes everything else so difficult.

EDIT: And we'll be losing him, too, soon. Sigh. RIP, Richard Rorty.

[masuki bance]

3. He's getting up there in age, is he sick? nt

[BlooInBloo]

7. Just old, as far as I know.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

9. I think he was on a wheel chair when Bill Maher interviewed him.

I don't know if it's temporary.

On edit I just read the article it explains the wheel chair.

[ej510]

8. I conversed about this yesterday with my father.

Americans relish idiocy. This country has pockets of willful ignorance. Half of the nation lacks comprehension skills. This nation is literacy challenged.

[WCGreen]

45. Damn it Boo, it my rite to be ignernt if in I wanna be...

Says right thar in that there Magnum Cart eye thingy I heard bout on the Histry station on the cable...

[polichick]

4. Well, I certainly agree that many Americans - maybe even most Americans - are...

...dim-witted and ignorant.

[HelenWheels]

5. He's right

the American public is getting dumber every day. Just look around at the tea baggers.

[GCP]

6. Gore, as usual, nails it

I think he lives abroad now, and I don't blame him. This country is sliding into Third Worldship day by day.

[damonm]

10. Gore, as usual, is dead wrong.

Passing judgment on a presidency with less than a quarter of the term gone? Idiocy.
Pronouncing healthcare reform dead with 5 separate bills on the subject going thru Congress? Foolish.
Being the very model of "blame America first" that helped Reagan gain traction? Un-FUCKING-forgivable.

[themaguffin]

12. that's assinine and here's why

Vidal may or may not be wrong about these comments, but read his books and he is dead on many many issues.

Just because you disagree with his comments here, doesn't erase decades of great writing.

[masuki bance]

19. He is a great writer, no doubt. nt

[damonm]

25. I have - he's still mostly wrong...

and he and his ilk were ammunition for the GOP revolution - the most damning thing I can say about him.

[Cha]

18. I don't know how usually wrong he is but

I also think he's dead wrong on this for your reasons.

"Passing judgment on a presidency with less than a quarter of the term gone? Idiocy.
Pronouncing healthcare reform dead with 5 separate bills on the subject going thru Congress? Foolish.
Being the very model of "blame America first" that helped Reagan gain traction? Un-FUCKING-forgivable."

PO got elected and they weren't stupid.

[BreweryYardRat]

44. Agreed.

Has Mr. Vidal ever heard the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy?"

Because spouting shit like this just makes the job of reforming our country more difficult.

[RepublicanElephant]

11. more emphasis should be placed on regulating the MEDIA.

they are the real educators of the american audience.

"On June 11, Representative Boucher, Chairman of the prestigious Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, held the first hearings on a proposal that would lift the current restrictions allowing for the licensing of thousands of 100-watt, non-commercial community radio stations across the country. The proposal would open up the airwaves to women, minorities, and small family operations like ours, who lack the corporate clout of large groups like Clear Channel, but who live and work in the communities that they serve."
http://www.suffolknewsherald.com/news/2009/sep/29/put-local-radio-back-congress-radar/

it's a start to taking back our airwaves.

[NYC Democrat]

13. there is not much regulation of media we can do legally.

[depakid]

53. Of course there is!

Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know the first thing about broadcast law- or is shilling for the corporate media.

[NYC Democrat]

14. so what does Gore want Obama to give speech's as if he was speaking to 5 year olds

How would that help Obama at all all all that would do is make people think Obama is a condescending elitist and make them hate him.

[Beacool]

15. Hey Vidal, you are not the only one regretting your primary vote.

Join the chorus.

:eyes:

[Ikonoklast]

16. Irony Alert.

[Beacool]

37. No irony involved.

One thing I liked about Hillary is that she's tough and a fighter when she needs to be.

Do you think that the likes of Pelosi, Reid and the other Congress critters would have rolled over her?

[Lilyeye]

39. Typical. You couldn't wait to get that in.

I was originally for Hillary, but I don't regret Obama winning ONE BIT!

[Beacool]

48. That's your prerrogative..........

:shrug:

"Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they're good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to."

:-)

[CakeGrrl]

22. Tell us something we DON'T already know about you, Beacool!

:rofl:

[Beacool]

35. Oh, I don't regret my primary vote at all.

;-)

[Starbucks Anarchist]

17. The same Gore Vidal who compared Tim McVeigh to Paul Revere?

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0817-04.htm

(snip)

The writer Gore Vidal yesterday compared the executed Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh to Paul Revere, the hero of American independence.

In a withering address at the Edinburgh book festival, the liberal novelist and elder statesman of the Gore political dynasty said the former soldier decorated for bravery in the Gulf war wanted to send out a warning that the government had been bought by corporate America and "its secret police, the FBI, were out of control. What McVeigh was saying was, 'The Feds are coming, the Feds are coming'. "

In his strongest identification yet with the man who confessed to blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people in retaliation for the FBI's "slaughter at Waco", Vidal described him as a "Kipling hero" with an "overdeveloped sense of justice" who did what he did because he was inflamed by the massacre, the FBI's subsequent cover-up, and the way it "had shredded the bill of rights and the constitution. He was the man who would be king."

[Cha]

20. So he's missed

before. What a surprise.

[Starbucks Anarchist]

27. That's a pretty big "miss."

[Cha]

28. Yeah, it is..just like this

one only more so.

[MarjorieG]

21. In Vidal world, Hillary less a hawk and Obama fixes health care, solo, despite corrupted Congress?

[geek tragedy]

23. Vidal's just upset Tim McVeigh wasn't on the ballot.

But, he's more than a little deranged these days. military coup? Puleaze.

[CakeGrrl]

24. Some are ignorant, some are dim-witted, and

don't forget the short-sighted and impatient.

And they're all scattered across the political spectrum. RWers don't have a total monopoly on these traits.

Where does he decide that Healthcare is DOA when nothing has been brought up for the President's signature?

He makes some fair points, and he misses on others, but this will shape up to be red meat for the "never wanted/liked Obama" demographic.

[Cha]

29. "The permanently disgruntled" as

Lord Helmet so aptly describes.

[SidneyCarton]

26. Another screed from a bitter, elitist ex-patriate.

Vidal reminds me of Jonas in the Old Testament. Having delivered his prophecy of doom, he settles outside of Nineveh awaiting their imminent destruction, and is enraged when it doesn't happen.

[rvablue]

33. +1! n/t

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

30. I am a black woman, and one thing that most, if not all, black people can't stand is belittling

and patronizing behavior of the white intellectual elite. I love Gore, but he's knows better. He supported Obama because "he grew up in a black neighborhood" and "Obama is intelligent." WOW!! Condescending, to say the least.

I do agree with him on one thing: the President failed to demonstrate true leadership on the health care issue. He should have learned from the stimulus fight how Republicans play the game. He should have been out, front and center, making his plan known and defining the health care reform agenda *BEFORE* the wingnuts had an opportunity to define it for him. I'm also sick and tired of hearing about bipartisanship. The Republicans don't want to work with the Dems. They want Obama destroyed. When will he wake up and finally realize and *accept* the truth.

The President is behaving more like a senator than a true leader. I am very disappointed.

[WeekendWarrior]

31. I continue to find it interesting

that people call Obama a fuck up and a disappointment when we're only nine months into his presidency. Remember that speech he gave when he won? That things would take time and wouldn't be easy?

Still it seems to me that everyone wants and expects him to be a miracle worker. Or they let one or two issues -- no matter how big they might be -- define the man before he's barely had a chance to deal with them. And considering the complete and utter mess Bush and Company left this country, I think Obama's doing pretty well.

Frankly, I don't see how his leadership would do anything to change the minds of a bunch of republicans and blue dogs who are in the pocket of the health insurance companies. What's he supposed to do? Bribe them himself?

Money talks and bullshit walks in this country. Always has.

And a president can only do so much when Congress doesn't want to listen.

[damonm]

32. DING DING DING...+1

[FrenchieCat]

34. The people you speak of have been pissing on Presidents

for the past 8 years....so it is all they know how to do.

They truly did think they were getting a Magic Negro. Although they claimed all along that they understood that he wasn't a miracle Messiah Savior, they lied. They really thought he came just in the nick of time to save the world at lighting speed.

That's why I've checked out from this site lately.....Don't feel like having to deal
with the unreasonable stupids. I'm reading other sites that appear to be more reasonable
in their expectations of what one man can achieve. I'll add, that these sites have posters
participating who have more respect for this President, and aren't thinking that they
have all of the answers sitting in their study.

[WeekendWarrior]

36. As you can see by my post count, I haven't participated much in this forum

but I've been around for quite awhile, taking it all in. What I find increasingly disturbing are those on our side of the fence who are sounding more and more as if they are simply the direct opposite of the tea bagger mentality, but have found a kind of kinship with them when it comes to stupidity, irrationality and a fervent belief in tinfoil hat motivations and conspiracies.

Everything is about REACTING without evaluating, then preaching to the choir. Some of things I read here just make me shake my head in wonder -- what planet do these people live on? How unhappy are they with their lives that they see nothing but doom and gloom and must find some nefarious motive in every move our government makes or fails to make?

It's GOVERNMENT, folks. It's a big turd of a machine that will never move quickly and will never answer the call from all of us. It can only do its best, and that best has never been and never will be stellar, no matter who is in office.

Yes, we've just been through eight years of shit, people, but get a grip, for Christ's sake.

All that said, there are also a lot of nuanced thinkers on this forum that help to balance things out. But the herd seems to be thinning fast.

[IndianaGreen]

38. How's Obama doing? "Dreadfully."

Gore Vidal is right on target:

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How's Obama doing? "Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we've had in that position for a long time. But he's inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He's acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism." America should leave Afghanistan, he says. "We've failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it." The "War on Terror" was "made up", Vidal says. "The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction'.

<snip>

Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred - religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they're fascists."

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. "He f***ed it up. I don't know how because the country wanted it. We'll never see it happen." As for his wider vision: "Maybe he doesn't have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there's a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it'. That's what Obama needs - a bit of Lincoln's chill."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/30-4

[paulk]

49. given his campaign as a change agent and leader

his sky high personal approval ratings and huge majorities in both houses of Congress -

perhaps people had a right to expect more from him. The fact is that Vidal gets one thing right - Obama's inexperience, and especially his inexperience in dealing with Congress, has hurt him.

[jesus_of_suburbia]

40. 3 things to remember when you listen to Vidal:

1) He's intelligent.

2) He's much more right than wrong.

3) He's a drama queen.


Keep all those in mind when you read anything from him.

[Fire1]

41. I have to agree with Mr. Vidal on that last quote in the OP.

Nail on the head. President Obama gives Americans WAAAAAAAY too much credit.

[BootinUp]

42. Mr. Vidal is of course exaggerating

things. There is a bit of truth in there, I think, wait let me read it again.

ok, 3rd para, 2nd sentence.

[alcibiades_mystery]

43. ROFL

Curmudgeonly, but funny.

[graywarrior]

46. Sometimes it's time to just retire.

[Umbral]

47. Somehow, I don't think Gore and Dennis are going to have allot to talk about under there...

aside from the usual pleasantries.

[LittleBlue]

50. Agree 100%. He is spot on.

Everything he said is completely, sadly, true.

[Drunken Irishman]

51. Remember how pissed many of us were at Phil Gramm for calling America a nation of whiners?

Yeah, having a flashback...

[ErinBerin84]

52. I disagree with the administration's Afghanistan track

but I don't get his "If only Hillary were president, it would be different" thinking...she's SOS, everything that I've read indicates that she was for troop increases (along with Obama), while Biden was the most skeptical of the three. Oh well.