The novelist and fantasist Gore Vidal has always been a political extremist. With him, it is business as usual to describe respectable conservative journalists as fascists or worse. The hysterical access of anti-Americanism and anti-Bush sentiment that has swept through the chattering classes of Europe and America in the last few years seems to have finally pushed the poor fellow over the edge. In “Uncensored Gore,” an interview in the November 14–20 issue of LA Weekly, an “alternative” (that is, rabidly left-wing) California paper, Vidal lets loose with a torrent of paranoid animadversion that should make his friends concerned for his sanity.

The ostensible occasion for the interview was the publication of a new book by Vidal about George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. The real subject of the interview, however, was Gore Vidal’s feelings of bitterness about America and its leaders. Vida ...

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