Gore Vidal hasn't mellowed with advancing years. Far from it, if anything he is more combative and irascible than ever.

He was interviewed recently by Stephen Sackur on the BBC program Hardtalk.

Vidal came close to pulling the rug out from under Sackur, who at times appeared to be at a loss for words in the face of his guest's wonderfully cutting responses. Gore Vidal has lost none of his chops.

During the Hardtalk interview he stated that "the sun is setting on imperial America" and was scathing in his condemnation of Bush.

In an earlier interview with Amy Goodman he was equally pointed when it came to his views of the Bush years.

Ms Goodman started out by asking Vidal for his thoughts on this election year and on the last eight years of George W. Bush in the White House.


GORE VIDAL: Well, it isn’t over yet. You know, he could still blow up the world. There’s every indication that he’s still thinking about attacking Iran: ‘And the generals are now reporting that the Iranians are a great danger and their weapons are being used to kill Americans.’

I mean, you know, I think, quite rightly, the Bushites think that the American people are idiots. They don’t get the point to anything. There are two good reasons for this, the public educational system for people, kids without money, let’s say, to put it tactfully, is one of the worst in the first world. It’s just terrible. And they end by knowing no history, certainly no American history.

AMY GOODMAN: ... here we are, moved into the sixth year of the war with Iraq, longer than the US was involved in World War II.

GORE VIDAL: Yes, incredible. That was such a huge operation on two great continents against two modern enemies. And we’re fighting little jungle wars for no reason, because we have a president who knows nothing about anything. He’s just blank. But he wants to show off: ‘I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!’ He goes yap, yap, yap. He’s like a crazed terrier. And look where he got us ...

They—Cheney, Bush—they wanted the war. They’re oilmen. They want a war to get more oil. They’re also extraordinarily stupid. These people don’t know anything about anything. But they have this—there’s a thick piece of—sheet of—a thick series of actions to be taken, among others—I think one of them was to lock up every person of color in the United States in order to protect us from the enemy within. It was evil stuff. So they latched onto that. I guess Mr. Gonzales was already in place by then. And that was the coup d’etat. They seized the state. And from that moment on, they were appointing all the judges, they were doing this, they were doing that, they got rid of Magna Carta—I will not explain what that is a second time—and they broke the republic.

AMY GOODMAN: The role of torture?

GORE VIDAL: Oh, everything was in there, yes. The USA PATRIOT Act is just the unnatural child of the Clinton ‘Oh, we’ve got to do something about these wild men in Montana.’

(break)

AMY GOODMAN: How did we get to be so hated, Gore Vidal?

GORE VIDAL: Well, there are many odious traits that Americans have that the rest of the world doesn’t like. Constant boasting with not much to boast about, that gets on other people’s nerves. The idea that, somehow or other, the whole world belongs to us and everybody should do what we tell them to do, they don’t really like that. Weird, but they don’t. There has never been a people less suited for world dominion than the Americans of the twentieth century and twenty-first century.

AMY GOODMAN: Will you write more about Bush?

GORE VIDAL: Of course not. I’ve written too much already. I mean, it’s a non-subject.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you want to be remembered?

GORE VIDAL: I don’t give a goddamn.

The above are key excerpts - for the full interview click here.