Here is Gore Vidal, often hailed as the most important literary essayist in America, a liberal maverick, whose languid but always spirited voice of opposition to most US administrations since Kennedy's Camelot never fails to find the keen ears of the European liberal-left. He was asked on Australian radio about what Vidal calls the "Bush-Cheney junta", and how the Iraqis could have been freed from Saddam Hussein's murderous regime without US armed force. His answer: "Don't you think that's their problem? That's not your problem and that's not my problem. There are many bad regimes on earth, we can list several hundred, at the moment I would put the Bush regime as one of them."

He was asked on the same show what he thought might happen in North Korea. Answer: "I don't think much of anything is going to happen; they'll go on starving to death as apparently they are or at least so the media tells us." And what about those media, specifically Fox TV? This is when the elegant drawl of the habitual old wit suddenly gathered heat: "Oh, it's disgusting, deeply disgusting, I've never heard people like that on television in my life and I've been on television for 50 years, since the very beginning of television in the United States. And I have never seen it as low, as false, one lie after the other in these squeaky voices that you get from these fast-talking men and women, it was pretty sick."