Despite his surprisingly mundane and misguided ideas on politics and economics, brilliant belletrist Gore Vidal, at 83, still manages to dazzle with his original insights. In a country in which homegrown retardation is more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism, that’s quite something.

Vidal recently gave an interview to the British Times from which it was clear that he no longer sees signs of the divine in Obama. Nevertheless, absent from the dismal score card he gave the president was a realistic appraisal of the putative gifts of Obama, a charmer who was elected based on his ability to sweetly say nothing much at all.

To his credit, Vidal is scathing about Obama’s talismanic, “solve that [war] and you solve terrorism” treatment of the Afghanistan war. At the same time he wants to see Obama, Lincoln-like, lord it over the people (especially with respect to health care). But those kinds of images go with the homoerotic territory.

In any event, his weak protestations over Obama are the least interesting of Vidal’s comments, the ones about Timothy McVeigh and the love that dare not speak its name the most interesting.

Read the interview.

Update I (Oct. 1): Some respect for Gore Vidal, please. He belongs to a generation of intellectuals who SERVED. Bravely. As a matter of interest, “Some 450 out of 750 Princeton graduates in the class of 1956 served in the military.” Samuel Huntington, one of America’s greatest scholars, served in the army. “All four of the Kennedy brothers served in the military; not one of the thirty Kennedy cousins has.” [Excerpted from Are We Rome?The Fall of An Empire And The State of America by Cullen Murphy, 2007, p. 82.]

Most of the neocon-minded war mongers have not served.

Of course, “our freedoms,” such as they are, do not come courtesy of our armed forces leveling this or the other far-flung protectorate abroad. That’s yet more neocon nonsense on stilts. Cheap sloganeering.

Update II: The proverbial Orwellian Ministry of Truth decrees how the peons think about the issues of the day. When it comes to Timothy McVeigh they’ve had the same degree of success as in ensconcing Rosa Parks as the new Founding Mother of America.

Vidal is rare and courageous in recognizing the legitimate effrontery against life and liberty that motivated McVeigh to commit his crime. He is also unique in acknowledging that McVeigh was not a rube, but a thoughtful man who had fought for his country and was familiar with its foundational principles and documents. Here is McVeigh on the American experiment gone wrong (haven’t you read the interview?):

I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.

The characters involved in the Waco massacre—our “brave” law and order officers and their puppet masters—deserved to be put to death too, but were not. Vidal has my respect for recognizing what the decidedly mediocre mind of a Rich Lowry has been incapable of. If Vidal were of a younger generation (like myself), his iconoclasm would have consigned him in mindless America to obscurity.

Update III: MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government is akin to conflating MY causes with those of, in Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” and I would add Al Gore (to round off the profile, and to poke at the humorless).

What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin (and Al Gore) were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that? Kudos to Vidal, however confused he is about all else, for recognizing this.

While out on a run one day, our alarm system was triggered. Not the full foghorn, mind you, but a sensor, which went off at the security company’s headquarters. As we were entering the home, two police officers were walking down the driveway and up the stairs. They were extremely polite, but stern. They told us they had received a report of an alarm going off at this address. Were we the owners of the abode, they wanted to know. “Yes,” we replied. They asked to see ID. We complied. Then they left. We were impressed with their professionalism and glad for the vigilance.

A similar thing happened to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. But he was not as pleased with the boys in blue as Sean and I were.

The case of Gates was catapulted to the headlines, first by the “Black In America” cable channel, CNN. Then by the mother ship docked at the White House. “Obama,” reports Fox News, “who is friends with the professor and documentary filmmaker, told reporters at a Wednesday night press conference that … ‘the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.'”

The fact that Gates was in the home is no proof he owned or resided in that home. More material: Obama was anything but impartial. His was the full-throated reaction of the president of Black America. Obama was ready with a bag of tricks that would have done the Sharpton-Jackson race baiters proud.

But back to Gates. He and his cabby had forced the front door, and it appears that Gates refused to produce an ID or any other information, calling Sgt. James Crowley a racist for requesting identification.

“According to the report, Gates then yelled, ‘This is what happens to black men in America.’ When Crowley tried to calm him down, Gates shouted, ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.'” And, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.”

Classy.

At this stage, I think the officer ought to have walked away. Just done the gentlemanly thing and bowed out. But when Gates followed Crowley out cussing, pulling rank and threatening him, the officer cuffed the professor for disorderly conduct. At this point, the officer, who so far had done his duty, lost it and gave in to oneupmanship.

Before commenting, do read the Disorderly Conduct Report, written by both Sergeant James Crowley and Officer James Figueroa (courtesy of “The Smoking Gun”).

Update I (July 24): THE AFRICAN ARISTOTLE. Soft sobriquets such as “PC” and “elitist” don’t come close to capturing the essence of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.

Let me do the honors. Gates is a man who has risen to the pinnacle of a society he hates. His stature he owes to the creation of bogus fields of specialty by a stupid, self-immolating WASP society. Described as “scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual,” among other effusions, Gates’ scholarship is in … drum roll … the “study of black culture,” a BS pursuit created to appease; to allow the intellectually undeserving to delude themselves and others that they’ve scaled considerable intellectual heights.

I’m appalled that no one has been remotely critical of the treatment this man is receiving as the crème de la crème of American intelligentsia; a man whose Wikipedia entry perfectly seriously lauds his skills at combining of “literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions.” Jacques Derrida at least was an educated deconstructionist. Ditto Michel Foucault.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, of the “Black In America” lamentations, had a frothing fit when trying to express her outrage at the treatment of this African Aristotle. O’Brien boasted about taking classes at Harvard with Gates the intellectual giant, and struggled to find the words with which to do justice to his towering achievements, not least of which is his gritty, terribly original role as an “outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon.” What you can’t best, you can at least trash.

Update II (July 25): Steve Sailer on Obama’s ingrained racism. Sailer also brings up a point I’ve hammered again and again on this blog and in my columns: The importance of Ricci, the white firefighter, refusing to go gently into the good night.

Obama’s comments at his news conference on the “stupidity” of the Cambridge Police Department were, despite all his lawyerly stipulations, a textbook example of racial prejudice in action. He had prejudged these specific events based on his deeply held views on the general racial situation in America.

As in Ricci, we see the value of civil servant unions in standing up to racialized politicians. Crowley’s cop union stood shoulder to shoulder with him and helped him face down the Governor and the President. Government employee unions are expensive, but they do have an interest in standing up for civil service rules in fighting the new racial spoils system perpetrated under the guise of “civil rights.”

Another lesson is that as the Establishment has ratcheted up Racism into the worst sin imaginable in the history of the world, it has not correspondingly ratcheted up the seriousness of the consequences of falsely accusing somebody of “racism.” It was clear from even Dr. Gates’s self-serving account that his accusations of racism against Officer Crowley were the product not of evidence but of his understandably tired, overexcited brain intersecting with his business interests as a prestige media race man. Crowley refused to buckle under to extraordinary pressure, going all the way up to the President, thus setting a new standard for how to respond to false charges.

It’s time to pressure Obama to publicly call on his friend Skip Gates to withdraw his charges of racism against Officer Crowley on the grounds that the epidemic of false charges of racism must be halted.

Now, that would be a Teachable Moment!

Update III (July 27): FIGHTING THE RACE BAITERS. On MSNBC, Eugene Robinson, the mediocre, mundane mind that has landed a lucrative post at the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize, smirked over the allegation that Gates had cussed. “He’s a superstar, one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed faculty members at the nation’s most prestigious university.” Such people don’t cuss. “C’mon,” Robinson jocularly intimated; Sgt. James Crowley is likely the liar.

Look, I hope you get that this fracas is never about the non-aggression principle: The libertarian law is the easy part; the no-brainer. As the libertarian law goes, Crowley was in the wrong. But there’s more to society than the skeletal non-aggression axiom. The real achievement here is Crowley’s; the Sgt. got the race hucksters to back down, and that includes The President of Black America. Is the WASP fed up to the back teeth? Will he fight for his rights? That’s to be seen.

I’m shocked. Sonia SotoSetAsides once admitted that her test scores “were not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale” (with the exception of the scores of Mighty Michelle O). Nor were her scores on par with the scores of the forgotten students the system had helped her usurp.
I’m so disillusioned (irony alert to the prosaic among you). Weren’t we promised by the POTUS, another recipient of racial preferential treatment, that Sotomayor had a first-rate legal mind? Don’t tell me that this society has been hollowed out like a husk at every level—private and public; local, state and federal—by statist social engineering? And so, once again, we were right to call Soto so-and-so a mediocrity, a product of racial set-asides. It’s all so very shocking. You want to add Larry Auster’s analysis to the specter of Soto admitting that her test scores left much to be desired. (On the bright side, perhaps a dim liberal bulb will do less damage as one of America’s new black-robed deities):

Update: “Her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.”

“Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar
books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘The Troll Under the Bridge’?” …

“Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review – all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.”

“… were it not for Ivy League dishonesty, Sotomayor would not have gotten into Princeton, would never have been ranked first in her class, would not have gotten into Yale Law, nor been named editor of Yale Law Review, and thus would not be a U.S. appellate court judge today or a nominee to the Supreme Court.”

Who else but Pat Buchanan could deliver such masterstrokes? (Okay… I do quite well). The only facet Pat forgets to speak to: the loss of the importance of object, intellectual standards.

I’m shocked. Sonia SotoSetAsides once admitted that her test scores “were not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale” (with the exception of the scores of Mighty Michelle O). Nor were her scores on par with the scores of the forgotten students the system had helped her usurp.
I’m so disillusioned (irony alert to the prosaic among you). Weren’t we promised by the POTUS, another recipient of racial preferential treatment, that Sotomayor had a first-rate legal mind? Don’t tell me that this society has been hollowed out like a husk at every level—private and public; local, state and federal—by statist social engineering? And so, once again, we were right to call Soto so-and-so a mediocrity, a product of racial set-asides. It’s all so very shocking. You want to add Larry Auster’s analysis to the specter of Soto admitting that her test scores left much to be desired. (On the bright side, perhaps a dim liberal bulb will do less damage as one of America’s new black-robed deities):

Update: “Her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.”

“Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar
books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘The Troll Under the Bridge’?” …

“Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review – all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.”

“… were it not for Ivy League dishonesty, Sotomayor would not have gotten into Princeton, would never have been ranked first in her class, would not have gotten into Yale Law, nor been named editor of Yale Law Review, and thus would not be a U.S. appellate court judge today or a nominee to the Supreme Court.”

Who else but Pat Buchanan could deliver such masterstrokes? (Okay… I do quite well). The only facet Pat forgets to speak to: the loss of the importance of object, intellectual standards.