Is a military takeover imminent?

A few days ago Newsmax, a conservative site I don’t ordinarily read, delivered a shocker--a piece by one of its columnists, John L. Perry. The contribution discusses the prospects for a military takeover of the United States. Here is an excerpt:

“There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.
“America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it won't. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:
# Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."
# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.
# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.”

And so forth.

Even Newsmax readers found the piece extreme, so the editors yanked it.

It seems that the Times of London is made of sterner stuff. In an adoring interview conducted by Tim Teeman, the egregious Gore Vidal spilled the beans on several topics.

Here is the key passage. Vidal: “We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realize how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is.” Moreover, he declares: “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.”

It seems that the right-wing nobody Perry and the brilliant intellectual Vidal have the same opinion: we will soon have a military dictatorship in this country. It’s not the same, some will say, because Perry welcomes this development, while Vidal deplores it. In reality, the two men are not that different. Perry concedes that militarization is not an ideal solution. For his part, Vidal thinks that the American people are so dim-witted that they cannot be trusted to govern themselves. Why not, then, let the military take over?

Politicians are certainly not the answer, he avers. “Has he met Obama?” asks the British interviewer. “’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.’

Isn’t this murderous prediction the same one that our liberal media have been indignantly denouncing whenever it emanates from conservatives?

There was some hope, Vidal thinks, with one politician, Hillary Clinton. That’s because she’s a “girl,” you see. But of course she lost her chance for the presidency.

Never fear, though, for there is one person Gore Vidal still admires, and that is the late Timothy McVeigh, with whom he exchanged an avid correspondence while the terrorist languished on death row. McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims.

Vidal is scathing about Edmund White, who took the correspondence as the basis for a play entitled Terre Haute, named for the jail where McVeigh was incarcerated before he was executed in 2001. White limns an erotically charged encounter between the bomber and the character based on Vidal. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”

This outburst reveals, methinks, more than a touch of self-contempt. Of course Vidal has long adhered to his version of the Kinsey doctrine that there are homosexual acts and no homosexual persons. At least he is not one of those, thank goodness! Still, he has boasted that he had sex with 1,000 men by the time he was 25. And how many women? Zero, I suspect. Has any woman ever come forward convincingly to attest that Gore has gored her? Of course not. Vidal is a one-sex guy. After all these years, the great Truth Teller has never been willing to be honest about the most important thing: himself. Let's face it dude, you're a FAG.

Despite his haughty air of patrician indifference, Vidal is an incorrigible name-dropper. He seeks constantly to inflate his own wobbly status by spouting whoppers regarding those he knows or is related to. His father Eugene Luther Vidal, Sr., we are told, “founded the airlines in the 1930s.” Vidal senior was a pilot and worked for some of the airlines. He also served for a while in the Roosevelt administration. But he certainly did not found the airlines.

One might think that Vidal is slipping into senility (he’s 83). But in fact he has always been just as he is now: a pompous, self-serving fabulator. He is right about one thing though, for a substantial segment of the American people does seem to be easily fooled. But they are not those pathetic rubes in the red states, they are the adoring kneejerks who applaud everything Vidal says, even down to his adulation of the murderous Timothy McVeigh.

Things could be worse, though. We are lucky that Vidal did not know Adolf Hitler. Then we would have learned how splendid that chap was also. He was a Constitution man too, you see.

UPDATE (Nov. 5, 2009). As always with Gore--there's more! In an interview that has just appeared in The Atlantic, he was asked to comment on the Polanski case.

Demonstrating the huge vocabulary that comes with his humongous brain, he sagely remarked: "I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?"

To which the interviewer bizarrely resonded; "I’ve certainly never heard that take on the story before."

Vidal: "First, I was in the middle of all that. [A threesome? WRD] Back then, we all were. Everybody knew everybody else. There was a totally different story at the time that doesn’t resemble anything that we’re now being told."

Interviewer: "What do you mean?"

Vidal: "The media can’t get anything straight. Plus, there’s usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press – lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then."

Vidal knows a thing or two about anti-Semitism. Still, it is distinctly odd of him to label Hollywood a haven of anti-Jewish sentiment. What planet is he living on? One need only recall the first petition in Polanski's favor, which was signed by many Hollywood luminaries, including a number who happen to be Jewish.

But it's worse. It is OK to rape a thirteen-year old girl if she's Catholic. That's what they deserve. Besides, she was a whore.

This man is an utter pig, who should be ostracized from any decent company. If America is deeply decadent, as Gorebore claims, then he is one of the prime examples.