A terrific fisking. I sometimes wonder how far people like Vidal have to go before some of the more rational elements in the loyal opposition get too embarrassed to quotethem or be associated with them. I'm sad to say that i think Vidal, Streisand, Fisk, et al. still have a ways to go.

The sad thing about all this is that, despite Rosenbaum's devastating takedown, most radical left-wingers (and radical right-wingers) will still choose to believe Vidal - not to mention conspiracy theorists extraordinaire like Mikey Rivero. Their hatred of America is so strong that they simply cannot comprehend the United States being the victim.

So what was the story about Nixon?

A real eye-opener. It makes me wonder, why did anyone who calls himself a liberal get (re)elected on Tuesday? Their "vanguards" like Vidal have entered an intellectual death spiral from which no coherent thought escapes, and as they hurtle toward oblivion, they can't help saying "It's the J-E-W-S, can't you see????"

Apparently Nixon had a tiny vidal

Ouch! Fisked and Misted at the same time. Maybe we need a new term for this: Gored or Vidaled or Fisted (Fisking+Misting). But I must say, the Idiotorian Side is strong with the Gored one.

No, no, no. Gore Vidal has produced a truly wonderful satire of the conspiracy theorists on the Left. Rosenbaum's deconstruction is inappropriate for a work of fiction.

Great piece. In other news, Interpol says Osama is alive:

[Link: news.bbc.co.uk...]

Loved this line ...

Here, what we’re really seeing is Gore Vidal—once so clear-sighted a skeptic—executing a "well-controlled downward spiral" into Internet conspiracy theory’s grassy knoll.

The whole Nixon pensis thing had me rolling. I about fell out of my chair when I read: "And the Left is always ready to swallow Richard Nixon penis stories, you might say."

Gore V., not only a boring writer, but now certifiably insane as well. No wonder he's the Left's darling. Bleech!

Back in the 80s Vidal wrote an article in The Nation attacking Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter -- and neo-con Jewish intellectuals in general -- for being Israeli agents: "I don't much like [Podhoretz] and I don't much like his country, which is Israel."

And blah blah blah - a typical and totally unoriginal "Izzy-American" rant. As a result of this, a large number of people on the left flipped out and blasted The Nation with angry letters, causing the editor to go into a sulk and complain about "libel" and "hate mail." And the magazine had to go through the ritual of explaining its non-anti-Semitism, which was tough because in those days you had to do it without smirking.

Vidal was just a little ahead of the times. If he wrote that article today, there'd be barely a peep from the left.

A little OT, but regarding the left's widening rift with reality, this is a current headline in the London Times Online:

"Democrats at a loss to explain their defeat"

[Link: www.timesonline.co.uk...]

They just don't get it.

#2 So ?? It does not matter Vidal is irrelevant

I do beleive the author is channeling Tom Servo
right Charles ??

HG

#6: "Maybe we need a new term: Gored or Vidaled or Fisted (Fisking = Misting).

Fisted. I like that. Of course, there's always the imagery that 'gored' inspires.
Decisions, decisions.

I have never understood why anyone could take Gore Vidal seriously. I must confess that I haven't read his books, but his public utterances are so repellant that I haven't wanted to. I remember catching a bit of a TV interview with him. The interviewer asked him a question, and his answer was so sneerily condescending that I decided never to take him seriously.

Pace Selmer (#11), one can accuse Vidal of many sins, but being a "boring writer" is not one of them.

As Rosenbaum himself concedes early in his piece,
he finds Vidal's conspiracy essay "shocking, disillusioning, particularly to someone like myself who has been a longtime admirer of Mr. Vidal’s essays, their intelligence, wit and precision, their erudition, elegance and fluidity."

Jamie Irons

Nom dePlume wrote:

I must confess that I haven't read his books, but his public utterances are so repellant that I haven't wanted to.

Actually, Lincoln and Burr are extremely worthwhile books, IMO. I suspect they were written with the assistance of some kind of medication. I don't trust Vidal as a historian, exactly, but he writes interesting historical fiction.

I'm glad to see "MiSTing" make the lexicon, though I always thought it should be "mysting". Either way, this kind of thing makes Anil Dash hopping mad -- he tends to equate coinage with hate crime.

The slow demise of Gore Vidal was evident in his teary-eyed conspiratorial rants in defense of "patriot" Timothy McVeigh for Vanity Fair magazine some two years ago.

What's refreshing? The left-wing polemics of Gore and his out-dated posse of fossil "intellectuals" (Sontag, Mailer, Roth) are finally being challenged and, subsequently, dismissed...History won't be so kind after all.

Whatcha think about this?

[Link: www.gooff.com...]

I didn't write it, so don't kill the messenger! =) I just want to know what you think, K?

#18 agreed I did like them both though Burr was better

#19 sooooooooo right the left does need new thinkers and people
nice to know the future of the democratic party was Mondull and Loserberg

Mr. Vidal definitely has forgotten to take his medication. Wow.

Still, I'm awfully pleased to see the wonderful, lamented Mystery Science Theater 3000 get a prominent mention.

To cheer us up from this batty-left rant, consider a quote I heard this morning on C-SPAN from self-described leftist intellectual Christopher Hitchens. Asked whether a war on Iraq would swell membership in Al Quaeda, he responded, more or less: "well, that's fine. They want to be martyrs. We're here to help."

I vote for making that the new motto of the US Air Force!

Pim wrote:

The slow demise of Gore Vidal was evident in his teary-eyed conspiratorial rants in defense of "patriot" Timothy McVeigh for Vanity Fair magazine some two years ago.

Yeah, and then there's that. And at other times, it pleases Vidal to make weird paleoconservative mating cries. And his disdain for "disloyal" Jewish eggheads has a little bit of nativist, Daughters-of-the-American-Revolution snobbery to it.

I read an account of the time, years ago, when one of the networks thought it would be funny to team up WF Buckley and Vidal for election night commentary. Vidal declared on the air that a majority of Americans are clinically insane, and called Buckley a Nazi, after which Buckley offered to punch his lights out. The network news-drone objected to WFB performing this public service, and I'm sure some programming VP had a lot of explaining to do. I would have like to have seen that.

I think Vidal belongs in the same literary tradition as H.P. Lovecraft (who couldn't decide whether he was a socialist, a fascist, or a New Dealer). A talented writer from a "good family", who is totally out of his f----g mind.

>>A real eye-opener. It makes me wonder,
>>why did anyone who calls himself a liberal
>>get (re)elected on Tuesday?

#4 - Please remember not to judge the entire liberal philosophy based on the rantings of a few self-proclaimed spokesmen and women. There is a lot more common sense, fairness and humanity from mainstream liberals that live in every city across America than you hear from some of the more well-broadcast ones.

I don't judge conservatives solely on the blatherings of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell, Thomas Sowell, Bill O'Reilly, Jesse Helms and others....so please don't think all liberals are in lockstep with the beliefs and actions of Vidal, James Carville, Barbara Streisand, Jesse Jackson, and others.

Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, won the governership of Tennessee on Tuesday. He is going to be a great leader for my state, and I'm quite glad the Republicans who crossed over to vote for him didn't equate his message with those on the extreme left. Everyone deserves to be considered on his or her own merits.

#23 Gore Vidal vs. WF Buckley:

I found this link that talks about it. Sounds pretty funny:

[Link: www.pitt.edu...]

Ha! The clip featuring the Buckley / Vidal exchange can be streamed off the page in Real Player...

It's amazing the kind of things that survive on the Internet - now if somebody could find streaming video of Vidal getting beaten up by Norman Mailer.

Barry #24:

That's a good point that you are making. I have to remind myself of it every so often, when I get really mad at the Clinton/McAuliffe/Daschle democrats. Their "take-no-prisoners", "the-end-justifies-the-means" approach is the complete antithesis beneficial political discourse. I have to remind myself that people like Bob Kerry, Max Clelland, Bill Bradley and Paul Tsongas were democrats, too. At least with them, what you see is what you get. I may disagree with some of their more left-leaning positions, but they stand for what seems like a kinder, gentler period in democratic party politics. While I am glad the republicans gained control of the Senate, I would gladly exchange my democrat Senator, the nefarious Dick Durbin, for the principled, gracious Clelland any day - I was sad that he lost.

BTW, If you think were are tough, you ought to go take a look at Lucianne.com - I've had to take a leave of absence from reading that blog!

Two questions?

Didn't Vidal write the script for an embarrassingly dreadful movie on Calligula?

And what is his relationship to that other bore, Al Gore?

Oops. My mistake. The trashy movie based on one of Gore Vidal's books was Myra Breckenridge, with Mae West on her way down the celebrity ladder. It's hard to take him seriously after that debacle, for those old enough to remember the 1970 film.

My other question, his relationship to Al Gore, is based on the fact that he took the name Gore after one of his grandfathers, a senator from Oklahoma, and I had heard that he was somehow connected to the past vice president. Not that it matters. Just curious.

canadian lady wrote:

The trashy movie based on one of Gore Vidal's books was Myra Breckenridge

Yes, but your first instinct was also correct - Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay for Caligula. And so Peter O'Toole and Sir John Gielgud were dragged into a technicolor morass of blood, sweat, and miscellaneous body fluids. Yeeech.

#8 NC: Sorry, on reading your BBC I got halfway into the article about the Interpol spokesman Ronald Noble declaring Osama alive when what did I find? The following weasel sentence:

"As long as I have NO PROOF TO THE CONTRARY, I will consider Osama a fugitive, well and truly alive." [emphasis mine]

Fisking that I find that after starting his interview with Le Figaro on a very emphatic note ("Osama IS alive") he then backs out of it which the statement that reveals he has no proof one way or the other and without it, and in the fact of an eyewitness to the December 10th destruction of the cave in which OBL was taking refuge in Tora Bora, nevertheless this Ronald Noble will choose to declare Bin Laden "well and truly alive."

In other words, it's his personal opinion [ONLY].

Right!

Barry (24) wrote:

I don't judge conservatives solely on the blatherings of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell, Thomas Sowell, Bill O'Reilly, Jesse Helms and others....

You make a mistake in lumping Sowell in with characters like Falwell and Helms. Thomas Sowell has written some excellent books, including "Ethnic America" and "The Vision of the Annointed." Like Pipes, he is a serious and courageous scholar who is hated by the P.C. crowd because his work undermines their most cherished beliefs.

As for Vidal, Martin Amis once wrote that he found Vidal's fiction unreadable, and I agree. I was impressed with his essays when I was an undergrad, but when I reread some of them a few years ago, I was turned off by the obvious contempt this patrician "populist" has for ordinary people. (It's much easier to deal with the snobbery of writers like Evelyn Waugh, because he didn't strike leftist poses.)

Lastly, I don't remember the details, but I believe I read of Vidal dismissing an attack on him by a Jewish conservative who called him anti-American. Vidal pointed out that he was descended from Old American Stock, while the Jewish fellow was, well, a J-E-W. Is there anything more irritating than WASPy leftists who claim to be for The People and yet are quick to remind everyone of their Mayflower connections? I met people like this when I lived out East and it annoyed me bigtime. Really, who gives a rip?

I've admired his work for years, but that 5th or however much he drinks every day has taken its' tool.

Gore Vidal is a cousin of Al Gore's, and also caught up (I believe) in the web of Kennedy connections through Jackie's side.

And he is a good writer, who enjoys pissing people off, so it's hard to tell how much he believes what he says. He's not a lefty ideologue the way Ralph Nader is, but he'll make those sort of remarks as a way of poking a stick into an anthill.

(I'm basing this on having read Palimpsest and some of his other non-fiction--when he talks about Mailer and Buckley the attitude seems to be "we disagreed, but I poured on the crazy a little bit to get a rise out of him." An interpretation, so I could be wrong.)

Everyone should read Sowell's "Ethnic America." It explains how ethnic differences are based on the past history of the group in question, without being judgmental, and it never claims these characteristics apply to each individual or are cast in stone, but they do explain the behavior of an ethnic group in the aggregate. It's multiculturalism done right.

I hate to interrupt a good group fisking, but there's a reason why Rosenbaum, did this
piece. He probably recognizes some of his
own walk on the idiotarian Anti-American side
and we're not talking back in the 60s either;
an almost exact turn on phrase; with the same
pregnant pause for effect;
Check out this article -- Of Bush, the Harris Rumor and James Baker's Junta. Here's the url: [Link: www.observer.com...]
ID=3502

Check out this article -- Skull and Bones, Denying Its Rite, Suckers AOL-TW. Here's the url: [Link: www.observer.com...]

The truth, is when there was a concerted effort
to keep our president from the office, Mr. Rosenbaum was part of a concerted effort
to block him. An effort, which delayed steps
to establish a cabinet while the Hamburg/Hollywood 19 was planning
their kamikazi mission, which claimed 3,000
lives