Who let Garrison Keillor loose from Lake Woebegone? He actually, literally calls upon the benighted spirit of Mark Twain to smite the Republican party with a slathering of his flaxen tongue. Who even does that anymore?! The last time I remember someone calling up the spirit of some dead seer to prognosticate the fortunes of a nation, Holy Jehovah, God of Israel and the ever-loving UNIVERSE, laid him to rest with a whithering blast from the underworld.
And so, a fisking that is mete of Keillor’s high-gone, bygone days of yore, when midwestern radio personalities didn’t have the kind of cajones it takes to stand at the base of a word cannon and fire shots of unsolicited herrings into the woods of American politics. Mr. Keillor, Mr. Big Man? Please, by all means, stuff this in your petulant craw.
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party.
Cliche No. 236, meet a clue. And since you’ve started on this tincture, the Republican Party hardly has a monopoly on nutsos and dingbats.
Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element.
Yes, and once the Democratic party was the party that stood up to iron-clad fascists and racists, not to mention women-haters and troglodytes. They were honourable men who acknowledged the benefit of discussion and rational political conversation, who opposed racism and isolationism, and refused to bow to a corrupted, compromised multilateral methodology.
The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero…blah blah blah…Richard Nixon.
I got a little sleepy here. I was growing all misty-eyed with fond recollections of the Ike and his gang of Republican good guys, back when war wasn’t anathema to the Democrats.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach.
Ah, Nixon, the turning point of Republican politics. Everything from him on can be broken down into one simple equation. Savvy political commentator, Keillor is.
Here’s a rule for the Democrats. If it was World War II and you fought in it, you were a hero. If you were in Vietnam, then you were party to the Great Deception. Unless you were John Kerry, in which case you were a hero, a self-professed war criminal, and a VAV (Veteran Against Vietnam), all three of which are sufficient to hand the keys of the Presidency over to you.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills…blah blah blah empty rhetoric shrill invectives murderous screeds name calling…deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Lamborghini libertarians? What the hell is that? Is it anything like a SUV Democrat? I’m surprised. It only took three paragraphs for Keillor to bust loose with an Al Gore Godwinism. I’ve been lumped in with the brownshirts in pinstripes. Murders and Executions, indeed. Remember that episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy spills cake mix all over herself? Keillor’s shouting here would not be unlike Ricky’s “LUUUCCCCYYY!!!” if he weren’t so damned serious. Democrats: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world laughed at our anti-terrorism policy up to 9/11.
O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Told you. He’s actually calling on Twain’s ghost! Presumably to read “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” on the air to a blend of America’s finest. Which would be fine, if Keillor could keep his big fat radio mouth talking in Lake Woebegone!
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy-the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
One of my favourite punctuation marks is a period. It helps break up these long-ass novels Keillor considers sentences. Tell you what G-man. We Republicans will talk a little less about 9/11 if your cronies will talk about it a little more. It’s all the Democrats can do to forget it ever happened. It’s been reduced from a universal tragedy to “the single greatest failure of national defense”. And Democrats are supposed to be sensitive and sharp?! I’m quite certain you’re right; George Bush instituted tax cuts hoping–hoping!–to bring the country to its economic knees. Yeah, good call.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy.
You know there are over 2 million millionaires in the United States? Well, that’s 2002 data. And that was down 100,000 from the previous year.
No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.
No republic in the history of humanity has ever had so many millionaires either. The omens say Mr. Keillor is simply envious and realizes he’s spent his life touring college auditoriums with his Land of the Thousand Lakes schtick, and hasn’t a million bucks to show for it. Stick to radio fictions, political fiction is not your strong suit.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear-fear, the greatest political strategy ever.
What the heck is fear-fear?
An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition.
And in the land of rhetoric, language like this is fine. Speak your mind, friend, tell us what you’re really getting at.
And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
Dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria! Please codify this “vague fear” to which you keep referring. This wouldn’t be fear of the unknown, would it? Or fear of fear, as FDR trumpeted? Maybe fear of the future? Something vague like that?
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to.
Oh, THAT fear. Yeah, that’s nothing. What are you still crying about, crybaby? 9/11 was frickin’ three years ago! Get over it! It happened once, so what’s to fear? It’s over! It’s done! Move on!
It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security.
Oh, you’re all heart, Garrison. 3,000 people wiped from the face of the earth. It was an event. A lapse of security.
And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Richard Clarke?
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
Whenever I think about that NPR-toting dreamer making griddle cakes on the airwaves with a microphone and a kazoo, I think of a guy whose personification of middle America is a right old fiction, like something pasted on a tree at Camp Crystal Lake. This is pure speculative yellow editorialism, and it stinks of sensationalistic mud-slinging.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics,
You mean like all my old college professors?
desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads.
Pot, meet kettle.
They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
We’re a very enthusiastic bunch. And we love firefighter footage.
The Union is what needs defending this year.
I absolutely agree. And it needs defending every year, not just four months in 1972 when it was convenient for one guy to be a soldier in Vietnam.
Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of.
You’re just babbling now.
This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
Again, use a FRIGGIN’ period! School prayer, flag burning, and book censure. That’s us in a nutshell! We also like to dump our sewage directly into the water supply, unlike your spurious accusation that we dump it upstream. Republicans want people to DIE, and we want them to die with the smell of our feces and urine and vomit and semen and all the other crap we put down our toilets on their DYING, POISONED NOSTRILS.
This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people.
It’s nice of you to say so, after spewing this bitter bile out onto the public Internet. We’re all waiting for you to shut up and git on back to Lake Shutthehellupagone.
We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we