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Gore Vidal: Michele Bachmann ‘Too Stupid To Deserve An Answer’

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and author Gore Vidal

You might recall how Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has said that she first became a Republican as a result of her disgust at reading a “snotty” Gore Vidal novel. So what does Gore Vidal think?

As we reported last week, Bachmann told a Republican crowd in Michigan that she cast off her youthful Democratic roots after reading Gore Vidal’s novel Burr, which depicted the Founding Fathers in an unfavorable light. (We later discovered that Bachmann had told this story before — and that in an earlier version of the tale, she said it had been a different Vidal novel, 1876.)

Our old colleague Justin Elliott at Salon did quite a lot of work to get a response from Vidal. And finally, through an assistant, he received this written statement from the man himself:

“She is too stupid to deserve an answer.”

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