You, that's obviously just your audience, which will clap apparently anything, is frivolous.

You mentioned Gore Vidal, and I do want to get into that a bit because he had an essay called Vidal Loco, published on the occasion of the second of Gore Vidal's autobiographies.

Vidal at one point was sort of a mentor figure to Hitchens,

called Hitchens his Dauphin, his successor, essentially. And then after 9-11, they had a much-discussed

parting of the ways. There's a documentary called Gore Vidal, the United States of Amnesia,

where you can see footage of Vidal snubbing Hitchens at his book launch.

I've never seen that. I should watch that.

I'm sure that incident captured on camera is probably what sparked this essay more than any other.

And I was reading this essay today, which I once found very fascinating.

And I just want to read this paragraph.

And I'm obviously not going to, I'm obviously

not going to defend everything that he quotes Vidal is saying here, but I think this paragraph is

revealing. I have now just finished reading a long interview conducted by Johan Hari of the London

Independent, in which Vidal decides to go slumming again and to indulge in the lowest in himself and in his

followers. He openly says that the Bush administration was probably in on the 9-11 attacks,

a criminal complicity that would certainly fit them to a T, that Timothy McVeigh was a noble boy,

no more murderous than General's Patton and Eisenhower, and that Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.

Coming a bit more up to date, Fidel says that the whole American experiment can now be described as a failure.

The country will soon take its place somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs.

President Obama will be buried

in the wreckage, broken by the Madhouse, after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan,

and the Chinese will emerge supreme. We shall then be the yellow man's burden, quote unquote,

...