U.S. publishers won't touch new book by Gore Vidal

MSNBC.com's Jeannette Walls reports that although Gore Vidal's latest book of essays, The End of Liberty--Towards a New Totalitarianism, is a best-seller in Italy, the author can't get the tome published in the United States. A source tells Walls that the book is anathema in Vidal's home country because "it's a vitriolic attack on America" and that one section of the book was originally commissioned for Vanity Fair, only to be rejected by the magazine for being too anti-American. Vidal has become an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, comparing some of the president's tactics with Hitler's and suggesting that the United States be kicked out of the United Nations. "The United States does not have an interest in Afghanistan," Vidal recently told The [London] Guardian. "The Bush family does. Oil.... Bush can keep the war going until 2004 so he can be reelected president." In an interview with the New Statesman,Vidal called the elder George Bush "a failure," adding that "when you get a bad gene pool, you don't necessarily enlarge it for high diving."