Boris on Gore -- The Other Gore

Boris's rowboat is zipping across an ocean of controversy. He's got notes on the Gore Vidal interview with Charlie Rose and it's really something to read.

All of it gives an American that tiresome feeling -- "Do we really have to wake up and look at what's happening here and admit we are in serious trouble and then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?"

I know the day when Andrew Sullivan finally crosses the line is coming. His comments after his summer vacation in Provincetown were as close as I've ever seen him going "left" but I think there's a lot of left left in him and he will have to revisit it when his integrity is finally assaulted one too many times by the party of old baggy thugs currently running this country. He might be right-wing, but he's right-on and he's a blogger and he's gay and all of that adds up after a while.

Excerpt from the LA Weekly interview with Gore guaranteed to burn your eyebrows off if you get too close to the screen:

LA WEEKLY: ... So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

Gore Vidal: No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.