Author/playwright/historian/gadfly (and let's not forget—actor) Gore Vidal is back in America after decades abroad and he talked to The LA Weekly's Marc Cooper in a Q&A about his new book on the founding fathers. Here are some highlights from the interview (amusingly titled Uncensored Gore):

Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.

So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with — even using much of the same language.
[...]
Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don't think he could endure the current dishonesty.
[...]
This business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents.

So much more to quote, here. But this may be the most salient question of all:

[Marc Cooper]: Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

Read all the Gore-y details at The LA Weekly