Expert predicts Obama's assassination, military dictatorship in US India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Well-known American essayist and intellectual Gore Vidal has predicted that President Barack Obama will soon glide the US towards a military dictatorship and may be assassinated just like two of his predecessors. "We'll have a military dictatorship soon, on the basis nobody else can hold everything together...But he's inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He's acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism," Times Online quoted Vidal, as saying. Predicting that Obama may be assassinated, he said: "Just one lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital." Vidal, 83, reveals that he regrets switching his allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Obama during last year's campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. "I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we've had in that position for a long time. His problem is being overeducated. He doesn't realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people," he said. "We've failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it," he added. On Obama's plan to reform healthcare, he said: "He f***** it up. I don't know how, because the country wanted it. We'll never see it happen." Referring to Obama's penchant for Linkon's philosophy, Vidal advised: "He loves quoting Lincoln and there's a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. 'I am President of the United States . I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it'. That's what Obama needs - a bit of Lincoln 's chill."