Garrison Keillor on the Republican Party

[Tsyroc]

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party
of Newt Gingrich's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and
rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?

By Garrison Keillor


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 constitution 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.

[Quadlok]

I knew he was going to snap sooner or later. Maintaining a genial front year after year on the radio, never getting in more than a few light hearted jabs at those he abhors, has to have worn on him.

And, scarily enough, what he wrote is true.

[Wicked Pilot]

I grow suspect of people who look back at the 50s through rose colored lenses.

[Tsyroc]

I grow suspect of people who look back at the 50s through rose colored lenses.

That is a little creepy. It might be worse though. He might see the 50s exactly as they were and still consider them better than what is happening with the current Republican party and I don't know that he'd be all that wrong.

I also don't know why the heck Newt Gingrich was mentioned. Man do people obsess over that guy, and he's been out of office longer than Clinton.


As for the rest. I think he makes some good points about the current Republican party. I certainly wish they were still busting up monopolies like Teddy Roosevelt instead of finding ways for them to be bigger.

I get tired of the anti-intellectualism and the constant push to weaken public schools etc....

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

I can't say that he's wrong there either.