Garrison Keillor, 2004. "Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party...."

[Fire Walk With Me]

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
By Garrison Keillor
August 26, 2004

Something has gone seriously haywire with the
Republican Party. 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.
The genial Eisenhower was their man, a
genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for
reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the
Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate
Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial
army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and
prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and
letters flourished and higher education burgeoned and
there was a degree of plain decency in the country.
Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's.
Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel
a Christian obligation toward the poor.

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. The Nixon
moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by
a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure
punk politics. "Bipartisanship is another term of
date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of
the GOP. "I don't want to abolish government. I
simply want to reduce it to the size where I can
drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the
bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and
government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified
into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and
corporate shills, faith-based economists,
fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of
convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat
boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes,
sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks,
Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil
Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New
Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest
of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch
president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free
flow of information and of secular institutions,
whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body
parts trying to walk.

Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world
thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in
the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough!
Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive
scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write
legislation to alleviate the suffering of
billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the
moonlight! 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.

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.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands
of the few is the death knell of democracy. 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.

Our beloved land has been fogged with fear --- fear,
the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous
silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered
warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and
silence the opposition. 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.

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. 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. And patriotism
shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of
the man who was purportedly in charge of national
security at the time.

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.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray
us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated
Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards,
people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the
Deadheads. 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.

The Union is what needs defending this year.
Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the
Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln
spoke of. 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
institution on behalf of intolerance and promote the
corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell
with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by
angry people. 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're not
getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is
reserved for those who in time of crisis remain
neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you,
dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine,
and there is more to life than winning.

[Mythsaje]

1. I don't say this too often,

but, boy, do I wish I'd written this.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. K & R. He's written some great editorials...

...in the last few years -- for my money this one was probably his best.

[pnorman]

3. That's the first time I had seen that. Thanks.

I see now that there are many web sources for that. Here's the first out of the gate: http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/keiller.cfm

pnorman

[Fire Walk With Me]

4. Thanks for the link! It says that this is from one of his books:

Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in its 25th year on the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor's new book, Homegrown Democrat (© 2004) is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

[NoFederales]

5. Eloquent, and bears re-reading often. nt

NoFederales

[Peace Patriot]

6. If he'd spent half that many words, or even a tenth of them, on exposing

the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002--aka HAVA, the fast-tracking, all over the country, of highly insecure and insider riggable electronic voting machines run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations--it might have done some good. I love Garrison Keillor, but I am mind-boggled by the silence of liberal commentators on this Stalinist vote counting system.

"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."--Josef Stalin.

Bushite corporations 'counting' all our votes with 'trade secret' code WAS the fascist coup. It was DESIGNED to provide a phony rubber-stamp for Bush and his war, and it was passed by the Anthrax Congress--which provided it with $3.9 billion in boondoggle funding--in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution (October 2002), and is closely related to it. Our political establishment is playing a deeply treasonous game on us.

It's all well and good to brilliantly describe what this Stalinist voting system hath wrought--the ugly, greedy, murderous slime who have taken over our government--and Keillor does it better than anybody. But ONE SENTENCE on "trade secret" vote counting by rightwing corporations, from Garrison Keillor, and America would be a different place today, with a real president and a congress that truly represents the American people, or, at least, we would be well on our way, by now, toward restoring vote counting that everyone can see and understand, and a country that we can recognize.

Anyway, I had to say it. I was thinking it all the way through reading this piece. It's not enough to expose how ugly Bushism is. We MUST understand how this horror retained power, and that the disaster of non-transparent, secret vote counting is STILL AT WORK in our political system--and is, in fact, determining the course of our nation--escalation of the war in Iraq, expansion of the theater of war to Iran, and fascism forever.

The other thing I was thinking, reading this, was the crushing blow that was about to be inflicted on the Democratic grass roots, which worked so hard to oust Bush, and which beat the pants off the Republicans in new voter registration in 2004, nearly 60/40. (Where did all those votes go?) They should have won. They DID win. Then the "Iron Curtain" came down--on both the utter fraudulence of the new voting SYSTEM that kept Bush in office, and on the failsafe plan, in case this untested voting system didn't accomplish its goal: massive disenfranchisement of black and other Democratic voters in Ohio and other states. It actually took BOTH methods to steal the 2004 election from the American people.

Then word came down from on high--the DNC--NOT to talk about these things, although talking about these things, and understanding them, was crucially important.

It was so heavy. It was so sad. It was so disheartening. And all the liberal commentators went right along with it. Don't talk about election fraud. Don't talk about this blatantly riggable election SYSTEM that produced a blatantly wrong result! Draw the curtain. Shut it down. Be quiet. Kill that kid who's crying, "The emperor has no clothes!"

If anybody could have gotten the word out, it would have been Garrison Keillor. But the lid was on so tight that he, like many other Americans, probably didn't even know. And whose fault is that? Who do we rely on to monitor how our votes are counted, and to alert us to problems in our election system--especially wildly flashing red siren problems like this one? Our Democratic Party leadership. So the problem isn't just that Bushites steal elections. What else is new? The problem is that our Democratic Party leadership helped them do it. And that, my friends, is a very, very, very, VERY appalling reality.

Yeah, Bushites are bad--ugly, greedy, murderous, treasonous bastards. But what do you expect from elections controlled by Bushite corporations, conducted under a veil of corporate secrecy? Hm-m?

[Fly by night]

7. This piece, published in IN THESE TIMES , was the impetus for my activism.

The resultant blog drew thousands of comments and engendered a great (and informative) debate between country-loving Americans and the Nazis in Republican clothing that we still do battle with today. After spending a week or so writing to the blog, I got off my ass and registered 909 people to vote here in Tennessee. Then, when the 2004 election was stolen, I got involved in the election reform movement, where I still reside today.

All because of an excellent and patriotic piece by Garrison Keillor published by IN THESE TIMES. Thanks for reminding me.

[semillama]

8. You know what Keillor's worst insult in there is?

The worst insult he used, at least as I imagine he would feel it to be, was when he called Bush a "non-reader."

[Supersedeas]

9. something every thoughtful Republican should read

[ulysses]

10. "Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight!"

:rofl:

[Fire Walk With Me]

11. One shameless kick.

It moves me to know how this has effected people. It's still possible to tell the truth and to move people to positive action. Many of us -are- working for change, but we don't always know about each other. Don't let it make you think that you are alone!

And I agree with two things: the voter machine problems are extremely important, and "hypocricies shining like cat turds in the moonlight" is really funny.

To the voter machine poster: Michael Moore went off on CNN recently regarding televised errors regarding "Sicko". He ended it with something I'll bet he's been waiting to say for several years-- That CNN could have helped prevent the Iraqi invasion, but they said nothing. That in having had an opportunity and failing to use it, they are perhaps responsible. Whap!