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’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”
Where is Biden in all of this? He has extensive foreign policy if not military experience.
But yes, Obama IS inexperienced and shouldn't even have run for the job, but when everybody is telling you you are the second coming of JFK, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, and just about every other famous name of the past 2,000 years, it's pretty hard to resist going for it. And in my skeptical view Obama was "allowed" to win the White House to set it up for the GOP down the road. I hope I am wrong about that because the country can't take another one of those Friedmanites in office, despite Obama having some of those same tendencies.
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.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.
Obama may or may not be a "fraud," but I think he is on the take just like all of the rest of them in Washington. We have GOT to get big money out of politics; it's wrecking this country to the point of no return.
Obama HAS fucked up health care reform, but he shouldn't have been even pushing it so early in his term. JOBS and job creation are far more important, but then there would be corporate opposition to any ideas to reverse the disastrous course this country has been on for thirty years with "outsourcing," the gutting of unions, and the erosion of the standard of living.
Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “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.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”
I agree Clinton would have been a much better president, and I also fear the GOP will get back in and then we will REALLY be screwed.
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