Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton look forward to “coffee summit”

Palin Finds One Bond With Clinton

NY Times | Nov 16, 2009

By SARAH WHEATON

Could there be a “coffee summit” in the future between Hillary Rodham Clinton — the secretary of state, runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, former senator and author — and Sarah Palin, author, former Republican vice-presidential candidate and former governor?

In her memoir, “Going Rogue,” Ms. Palin offers a political olive branch to Mrs. Clinton, saying it was only after her own experience on the national campaign trail that she came to agree with the former presidential contender’s complaints about biased news coverage.

In an appearance Sunday morning on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” the host read Mrs. Clinton a passage from the Palin book:

“Should Secretary Clinton and I ever sit down over a cup of coffee, I know that we will fundamentally disagree on many issues. But my hat is off to her hard work on the 2008 campaign trail. A lot of her supporters think she proved what Margaret Thatcher proclaimed: ‘If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.’ ”

Mrs. Clinton smiled and replied, “Well, you know, I’ve never met her.”

“And look,” she continued, “I’d look forward to sit down and talk with her. Obviously, we’re going to hear a lot more from her in the upcoming weeks with her book coming out, and I would look forward to having a chance to actually get to meet her.”

Within hours of that appearance, the blogosphere had already christened a potential tête-à-tête as the “coffee summit.”

Ms. Palin resigned as governor of Alaska in July, before the end of her first term, citing a desire to pursue goals outside of elected office.

Mrs. Clinton, asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos on Sunday if she was contemplating a run for the governor’s office in New York, promptly used the question to dismiss the suggestion.

“That rumor is dead,” she said. “And if you can please, you know, put it in a little box and send it off somewhere, I’d appreciate it.”

Taliban blames ISI, PPP, Blackwater for recent terror attacks

littleabout.com | Nov 14, 2009

Islamabad, Nov.14 – ANI: The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has blamed the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Awami National Party, the Pakistan Peoples Party and private US security firm Blackwater for the recent spate of terror activities across the country.

Self proclaimed TTP spokesperson Azam Tariq issued a statement which states that the recent terror attacks were the handiwork of the ISI,the ruling PPP and Balckwater and was aimed at maligning the image of the outlawed group.

We deem un-Islamic killings haram, as we believe in jihad.All these killings by the infamous Blackwater are aimed at maligning the Taliban. The TTP does not believe in killing of innocent citizens, and we will hold those who are doing this accountable, The Daily Times quoted Tariq, as saying.

He asked people to keep a close watch on people fanning terror and urged them to stand by the Taliban.

The recent spate of violence in Pakistan, in which hundreds of innocent people have been killed, has sparked an outrage against the Taliban in the country.

Meanwhile, Interior Minister Rehman Malik has denied the presence of Blackwater (Xe Worldwide) in the country.

Speaking at the National Assembly, Malik said only a few of US security company DynCorp have been allowed to work in Karachi to provide security to US personnel present in Afghanistan.

DynCorp has been working in Afghanistan for security purposes and was committed to abide by Pakistani laws, Malik said. – ANI

How the US Funds the Taliban

Taliban fighters in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. Reuters

It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting.

The Nation | Nov 11, 2009

By Aram Roston

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak’s connections there. On NCL’s advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.

But the biggest deal that NCL got–the contract that brought it into Afghanistan’s major leagues–was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a Weapons System,” the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require.” Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

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Elder Bush sees ‘ugliness’ in attacks on Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama is introduced to speak by former President George H.W. Bush at the Points of Light forum at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 16, 2009. Reuters Pictures

AP | Oct 19, 2009

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Former President George H.W. Bush doesn’t like the “ugliness” President Barack Obama has faced since taking office, but he thinks it’s no worse than his son experienced and is not about Obama being black.

Bush, who was hosting Obama at a volunteerism forum here Friday, said the tone of the criticism “crosses the line of civility.”

“To the degree it turns off one student or young person from serving, that’s bad,” Bush said in an interview with CBS News Radio at his presidential library. “It should not happen.”

President Barack Obama greets students as he is introduced by former President George H.W. Bush (not shown) at the start of the Points of Light Institute forum at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Friday, Oct. 16, 2009. AP Photo

But Bush stressed that conservatives aren’t the only ones to blame. Liberal pundits heaped similar scorn on his son, former President George W. Bush.

“They just hammered him mercilessly — and I think obscenely — a lot of the time,” he said.

Former President Jimmy Carter recently asserted that much of the bitterness aimed at Obama stemmed from his being the nation’s first black president.

Obama disagreed.

The elder Bush said, “You might find some racists out there but I don’t think the attacks per se have to do that he’s an African-American.”

Bush, who turned 85 in June, said presidents throughout history have suffered at the hands of critics.

“I’m reluctant to say it’s a whole new thing in politics — this ugliness,” he said. “I mean you go back to Grover Cleveland … It was terrible the things that people said.”

Benito Mussolini got started with help of British secret service

Recruited by MI5: the name’s Mussolini.

Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy in the first world war.

Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5

guardian.co.uk | Oct 13, 2009

by Tom Kington in Rome

History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to “persuade” peace protesters to stay at home.

Mussolini’s payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5’s man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.

Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: “Britain’s least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia’s pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today.”

Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Hoare’s papers.

Mussolini In Power

As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

“The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash,” said Martland.

“I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses.”

After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist dictorship by the mid-1920s.

His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over Abyssinia.

“There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy,” said Martland, whose research is included in Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.

The unpopularity of the Hoare-Laval pact in Britain forced Hoare to resign. Mussolini, meanwhile, built on his new colonial clout to ally with Hitler, entering the second world war in 1940, this time to fight against the allies.

Deposed following the allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini was killed with his mistress, Clara Petacci, by Italian partisans while fleeing Italy in an attempt to reach Switzerland two years later.

Martland said: “Mussolini ended his life hung upside down in Milan, but history has not been kind to Hoare either, condemned as an appeaser of fascism alongside Neville Chamberlain.”

Queen ‘appalled’ at Church of England moves, claim Vatican moles

When Pope Benedict visits this country next year, he is expected to stay at Buckingham Palace as a guest of the Queen. The warmth of her welcome will come as no surprise to the Pontiff, if senior sources at the Vatican are to be believed.

Telegraph | Oct 8, 2009

By Richard Eden

According to informants quoted in The Catholic Herald, the Queen has “grown increasingly sympathetic” to the Catholic Church over the years while being “appalled”, along with the Prince of Wales, at developments in the Church of England.

The usually well-informed newspaper adds that the Queen, who is the Supreme Governor of the C of E, is “also said to have an affinity with the Holy Father, who is of her generation”.

In July, The Sunday Telegraph disclosed that the Queen had told the heads of a traditionalist group, formed in response to the liberal direction of some parts of the Anglican Communion, that she “understood their concerns” about the future of the 80 million-strong global church.

One leading evangelical said: “We found the letters very supportive.”

Her intervention was predicted to have surprised many because the group, called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, was feared by some to be a divisive force and one of its senior figures was this accused of being homophobic.

The then Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, called on homosexuals to repent. He said the Church of England must stick to the Biblical teaching that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

“We want to hold on to the traditional teaching of the Church,” he said. “We don’t want to be rolled over by culture and trends in the Church,” said the bishop, who was one of the most senior religious figures in England.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman declines to comment.

World Bank welcomes New Economic Order from the ashes of crisis

China and India set to become established global powers

Euro and renminbi tipped to join dollar as reserve currencies

Observer | Oct 4, 2009

by Larry Elliott in Istanbul

The wrenching financial crisis of the past two years will provide the catalyst for a profound change in the global economy – which, according to the man running the World Bank, will see China and India become established centres of power, the dollar eclipsed as the sole reserve currency, and Latin America, south-east Asia and Africa emerge as new sources of growth.

But as he surveys the wreckage caused by what the bank and its sister organisation, the International Monetary Fund, agree is the most severe crisis since the devastation caused by the second world war, Robert Zoellick is surprisingly upbeat about the future.

Asked by the Observer how he envisages the global economy in 20 years’ time, Zoellick says: “There will certainly be a larger role for the emerging powers, there will be multipolar sources of growth, there will be more south-south trade between developing countries.

“The crisis gives us the opportunity to hasten this process. If we are concerned about the past reliance for growth on the US consumer, we have to make sure consumers in developing countries have enough finance to buy.”

Zoellick says that, while this does not mean the end of the US as a big player on the world stage, it has brought the curtain down on the unipolar world that followed the collapse of communism 20 years ago.

Developing countries were on the rise before the credit crunch and, as the latest snapshot of the global economy released last week illustrates, their position has been strengthened by their ability to keep growing as the west teetered on the brink of a 1930s-style Depression.

“We have reached a tipping point in global economic affairs,” says Stephen King, chief economist of HSBC. “While there are some encouraging signs of recovery in the developed world, the real economic action is taking place elsewhere. For both cyclical and structural reasons, the emerging nations are set to dominate world economic activity in the years ahead.”

America, Zoellick says, can no longer rely on the dollar ruling the roost. The euro and the Chinese renminbi are candidates to become reserve currencies.

Tellingly, this year’s annual meetings of the Bank and Fund take place in Istanbul, the point where Europe meets Asia and for almost two millennia a melting pot for cultures and religions. The view of both Zoellick and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, is that there is a discernible shift in power and influence eastwards.

“These annual meetings take place at a defining moment in global governance,” Strauss-Kahn says. “We have experienced unparalleled economic co-operation in the last 12 months. It has never happened in history.”

While noting that there is a risk of the consensus vanishing now the immediate threat of economic meltdown has receded, Strauss-Kahn says it is the will of world leaders to continue collaborating in the years ahead. The days of the G7 – an elite gathering of policymakers from the US, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada – are over. Power has shifted to the G20, which includes the G7 plus a number of leading developing countries such as China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa.

John Hawksworth, head of macro-economics at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in the UK, says political influence will result from the increased economic clout of the big developing countries. Within two decades, he says, China may have overtaken the US as the world’s biggest economy once the lower cost of living is taken into account. “The E7 [Emerging Seven] – China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Indonesia and Mexico – could be a lot bigger than the current G7,” he adds.

PwC estimates that the global economy will double in size by the end of the 2020s to $143tn (£90tn) at today’s prices, with the E7 accounting for almost 40% of GDP and the G7 30%. “The E7 is already not that far behind the G7 and that process has been accelerated by the current crisis, which has hit the developed world harder than the big emerging economies,” says Hawksworth.

Like Zoellick, he thinks the dollar will no longer be the dominant currency. “The dollar, the euro and the renminbi will form a basket of currencies. The world will be different. The recession has accelerated that process.”

The IMF and the World Bank are still set in their original mould, he says. “Voting shares are going to have to change and it will be a gradual process. But it is possible that there will be a Chinese head of the fund or bank by that time.”

Such an outcome would symbolise the changing of the guard. There has been a gentlemen’s agreement that the head of the World Bank should be chosen by the Americans, the single biggest shareholder in the two institutions, while the managing director of the fund is picked by the Europeans. Zoellick is a former US trade representative; Strauss-Kahn was once France’s finance minister.

“There is an inevitability about this [shift in power to Asia],” says Hawksworth. “You can already see it in the business world, as witnessed by the HSBC decision. The centre of economic gravity is shifting and will continue to shift.”

Zoellick says the spread of prosperity to the poor parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa will be accelerated by investment in infrastructure, social safety nets and manufacturing.

Critics say the bank and the fund have too rosy a view of the future. One threat, recognised by the IMF, is that the 3.1% growth pencilled in for 2010 following the first year of global economic contraction since 1945 will prove a false dawn. Once the artificial stimulus of public borrowing wears off, the fear is that a rationing of credit by enfeebled banks will prevent the private sector from taking up the baton.

Another issue is the willingness of the old world to cede power. The IMF and World Bank were set up at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 and their governance still reflects the dynamics of the 1940s. Reforms are being undertaken, but they are neither radical nor rapid enough to satisfy campaigners.

Peter Chowla of the Bretton Woods Project, a London-based NGO, says the changes amount to a “lick of paint on rotten foundations”.

Finally, there are those who believe the determination of the bank and fund to return as quickly as possible to the high levels of growth seen earlier this decade ignores the elephant in the room – that, by 2029, traditional fossil fuel stocks will be running dry.

Andrew Simms, head of policy at the New Economics Foundation thinktank, says: “One major thing that will describe the landscape in 2029 is that we will be beyond the point of peak oil. That will be the trigger for so many dominoes to fall.” Decisions made in the next few years, he adds, will be critical. “There is the risk of enormous knock-on effects on trade and food supply, with the food price volatility of the last year looking like a vicar’s tea party.”

He believes food security will replace gross domestic product as the yardstick of success, and there will be an emphasis on the new “three Rs” – reduce, repair, recycle.

In one respect, Zoellick, Strauss-Kahn and Simms are in full agreement: decisions taken in the next two or three years will shape the next two or three decades.

“We are balanced on a knife edge,” Simms says. “The potentialities are wonderful; the probabilities deeply disturbing.”

Glenn Beck Warns of ‘Reichstag Event’

Glenn Beck Exclusive: Warns of ‘Reichstag Event’

Newsmax | Sep 29, 2009

Media phenomenon Glenn Beck recently sat down with Newsmax for an exclusive interview offering his take on everything from President Obama, to the threat to talk radio and even a worry that our Constitutional government may disappear after a “Reichstag” event takes place.

The candid, wide-ranging interview appears in the October issue of Newsmax magazine, and is included in the special report “Glenn Beck Wants You!” that takes an in-depth look at the TV host whose Fox News show has been breaking ratings records since it burst on the scene in January.

Beck, who is also thriving on the radio, in bookstores and on the comedy circuit, sat down with Newsmax magazine’s Editor in Chief Christopher Ruddy and voiced his concerns about a coming attack on talk radio.

But his real worry is that many Washington elitists really don’t like our form of government and want to see it abolished.

“I fear a Reichstag moment,” he said, referring to the 1933 burning of Germany’s parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on communists and Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional liberties and consolidate power.

“God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced.”

Beck has also been a fierce critic of President Obama. Still, he said he’s open to a meeting with Obama. Beck doesn’t believe the president “necessarily would” speak directly to him, adding: “I don’t know very many politicians that speak directly.”

Beck also talked to Newsmax about his critics, his best-selling book “Common Sense,” his condemnation of George W. Bush’s presidency, government control of the media and “the only thing that will save this country.”

Firefighter lit fires so he could put them out

The Age | Oct 2, 2009

by ADRIAN LOWE

Arsonist Jarred Brewer. Photo: Angela Wylie

VOLUNTEER firefighter Jarred Brewer had never seen a bushfire and as a junior in his brigade, was restless.

To get a chance at fighting a fire and getting a ride on a truck, he made hoax phone calls to triple-zero to have local Country Fire Authority brigades stretched to a point where they called junior officers to attend scenes.

On four occasions between May last year and January this year, Brewer, a member of the Darraweit Guim CFA brigade, made 16 false calls – as many as six in one day.

He also lit bushfires over summer months; in Clonbinane and Wallan on November 12 and Christmas Day last year and January 15 this year.

Brewer, 20, pleaded guilty in the County Court yesterday to 19 charges – three of intentionally lighting a bushfire and 16 of making false calls to emergency services.

Judge Tony Duckett said of Brewer’s offending: ”It’s just something he took delight in doing. He couldn’t get on all those trucks.

”[But] the consequence could have been the death of another person if the [emergency] facility didn’t reach them.”

In one call, Brewer claimed a house was alight after its Christmas tree had toppled over. In others, he told authorities serious car crashes had occurred or fires had started in homes throughout Clonbinane, Kilmore and Wallan.

In each call, Brewer left a false name and phone number, or no number. Before making each call, he removed the SIM card from the phone in an attempt to go undetected, prosecutor Gavin Silbert, SC, said.

On Christmas Day, Brewer drove to Mount Disappointment and set fire to parkland by emptying a diesel can. Fire investigators found used and unused aerosol cans, matches and electric sparklers at the scene.

Defence lawyer Sandra Lacy said: ”To be on the firetruck appears to be something that he wanted to do.

”What it might be interpreted as is an attempt to exhaust services of other areas so he gets on a truck … and gets that experience on a truck.”

Mr Silbert said an immediate jail term of at least three years was sought.

Giving evidence, clinical psychiatrist Dr Geoffrey Cummins said Brewer was ‘’shocked he could be regarded as an arsonist”.

She said the 20-year-old did not have the same comprehension of his offending as an ordinary person would, due in part to an intellectual disability.

”I would not expect him to reoffend,” Dr Cummins said.

In an ill-fated application for Brewer’s name and home address to be suppressed, Judge Duckett told Ms Lacy: ”I don’t think there’s any possibility your client will be returning to that address for some time.”

Judge Duckett adjourned to sentencing to a date to be fixed so a report could be obtained to assess Brewer’s suitability for a youth justice centre.

But, he emphasised, that did not mean Brewer would serve his sentence in such a centre.

Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’

The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it

The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

London Times | Sep 30, 2009

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.” In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

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.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

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