Garrison Keillor for President

[shereads]

I just started the audio book of Keiller's "Homegrown Democrat." I've never read a more hard-hitting, heartfelt, unapologetic treatise on what it means to be a liberal in America. If the Democratic convention and our advertising campaign had consisted of nothing but Keillor reading from the first two chapters of this book, that vile monkey and Cheney would have been sent packing.

Someone posted an excerpt here a few months ago, and I wish I could find it. ("Lambourghini Libertarians," anyone?)

"The last Republican president who felt a Christian obligation to the poor was Richard Nixon." (How disconerting is it that self-proclaimed "moderate" Republicans have caused liberals from Hunter Thompson to Garrison Keiller to feel an almost affectionate nostalgia for the paranoid hoodlum who authored the October Surprise, the Enemies List, Dirty Tricks and treated the White House like his private mafia headquarters? He didn't disdian social spending, and he created the Environmental Protection Agency, so by 2004 standards Tricky Dick was pretty far to the left.).

"George W. Bush is leading America down the plank-road to old Dixie. In his vision of America, everyone who isn't a well-heeled plantation owner is either a supervisor or a barefoot field hand in overalls."

And the one thing I most needed to hear right now from someone who's been a Democrat longer than I have:

"Democrats are deciduous. We fade, we lose hope. We appear to die away. Then something stirs the sap and gets it moving again. We return, full of passion."

 

[Edward Teach]

I just started the audio book of Keiller's "Homegrown Democrat." I've never read a more hard-hitting, heartfelt, unapologetic treatise on what it means to be a liberal in America. If the Democratic convention and our advertising campaign had consisted of nothing but Keillor reading from the first two chapters of this book, that vile monkey and Cheney would have been sent packing.

Someone posted an excerpt here a few months ago, and I wish I could find it. ("Lambourghini Libertarians," anyone?)

"The last Republican president who felt a Christian obligation to the poor was Richard Nixon." (How disconerting is it that self-proclaimed "moderate" Republicans have caused liberals from Hunter Thompson to Garrison Keiller to feel an almost affectionate nostalgia for the paranoid hoodlum who authored the October Surprise, the Enemies List, Dirty Tricks and treated the White House like his private mafia headquarters? He didn't disdian social spending, and he created the Environmental Protection Agency, so by 2004 standards Tricky Dick was pretty far to the left.).

"George W. Bush is leading America down the plank-road to old Dixie. In his vision of America, everyone who isn't a well-heeled plantation owner is either a supervisor or a barefoot field hand in overalls."

And the one thing I most needed to hear right now from someone who's been a Democrat longer than I have:

"Democrats are deciduous. We fade, we lose hope. We appear to die away. Then something stirs the sap and gets it moving again. We return, full of passion."

It is ironic that the US electing a president like Bush is exactly what Nixon was trying to prevent with Watergate. Looking back at Johnson’s having defeated Goldwater in a landslide by painting him as extremely right wing, Nixon thought there would never in the foreseeable future be a presidential candidate from the far right. He decided that he could do the nation a great service by "selecting" his opponent, whom he preferred to be Eugene McCarthy but whom he subsequently had to give up on, paint that opponent extremely left wing and beat him badly, just as Johnson had Goldwater, thereby assuring that every president in the foreseeable future would be a moderate. At least that was the pitch Maurice Stans made to the fat cats he met with during his two record breaking fundraising trips around the country in 1972.


Ed

 

[shereads]

TheBullet posted this first. Inspired me to buy the book.

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

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. <SR appreciates the irony here, but finds it a bit too rich. Avoiding military service and painting their opponents who served as anti-military is one of the right's most successful themes.>

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 for 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 show 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 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.

This should have been the keynote speech at the convention. There was a message, but it was a muted by fear and beaten into submission.

Speaking of which, a belated Veterans' Day nod to Max Cleland, John Kerry and the other Untouchables whose voluntary service in Vietnam earned them nothing but the scorn of patriotic Republicans.

 

[rgraham666]

There's that damned sound again.

The sound of knitting with a regular meaty 'THUNK!' thrown in.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

That's what the dems need now more than ever. People who are willing to call the modern Republicans what they are. Who are willing to strip off the paint of faith and patriotism and family. These people have spit in their savior's eye, pissed on the country, people, institutions, and history they claim to love, and we won't get into what they have done to the idea of family.

The dems have been scared shitless since Reagan and have allowed themselves to be shafted on every empty rhetoric without a fight. Yes, liberalism has truth on their side, compassion, and all that jazz. It's time they fought for all that and take back the rhetorical positions that were stolen from them. Liberals are the ones fighting tooth and nail for better school funding, upholding the teachings of Christ, and loving the environment and diversity that makes up this country. It's time we said that on the national scene instead of in angry chatrooms with guns to our heads.

 

[shereads]

That's what the dems need now more than ever. People who are willing to call the modern Republicans what they are. Who are willing to strip off the paint of faith and patriotism and family...The dems have been scared shitless since Reagan and have allowed themselves to be shafted on every empty rhetoric without a fight. Yes, liberalism has truth on their side, compassion, and all that jazz. It's time they fought for all that and take back the rhetorical positions that were stolen from them. Liberals are the ones fighting tooth and nail for better school funding, upholding the teachings of Christ, and loving the environment and diversity that makes up this country. It's time we said that on the national scene instead of in angry chatrooms with guns to our heads.

Well said, Luc. I'm sick of hearing Republicans, parrotted by apologists for the Democratic party, claiming that Democrats have to move more to the middle to regain a voice in government. Bull. The problem with the party is not that it nominated a iberal but that it was afraid to nominate one: Howard Dean. His candor would have come into fashion during the debates, where it clearly wasn't enough that Kerry was better informed and had sound ideas. There were still people waiting for somebody to make them mad enough, get them excited enough, to go to the polls. And that will never be done by a party that takes positions that are Slightly-To-The-Left-Of-The-Extreme-Right. "We don't favor gay marriage, but we won't ban it. We agree that abortion is wrong, but we won't ban it." On Iraq, somebody needed to say what Dean would have said: Congress voted to give the president war powers because they trusted his lies and because they were terrified of being given the Max Cleland treatment. On terrorism, somebody needed to point out that George W. Bush has made us victims of terror in ways that Osama bin Laden never dreamed of. He used 9/11 without a blush of shame; not a day has gone by since that one without the mention of Terror, thanks to him and his political strategists. We're consumed by it, and that isn't Osama's doing.

On the economy, it should have been pointed out that the neocon philosophy is amenable to massive budget deficits for one reason: social spending is the first thing to go when the bill comes due, and neocons despise spending public money on anything except weapons, war, and subsidies. Alan Greenspan and Paul O'Neill knew that even if the budget surplus had been smaller than predicted, it was enough to save social security and have some left over. Bush knew that too. Social Security is one of those "entitlements" that he hates, as anyone who was listening during his first campaign would remember. To hear him talk about it now as if he's trying to save it is sickening.

What I admire about Keillor is that he doesn't defend liberalism; he reminds us that it is the most American way of thinking, and that modern conservatives are against the essential American values: tolerance, compassion for the poor, a willingness to sacrifice certain things so that future generations can live at least as well as we have; a willingness to share our wealth when we have it, and an inability to understand why anyone who's financially well-off wouldn't be willing to do the same; an understanding that it's right and fair to tax inherited wealth because it's the only way to prevent the emergence of an American aristocracy - and because the recipient hasn't done anything to earn it except be born.

We're better people than they are. That's a weakness only if we allow it to be. We can't stomach the free use of Karl Rove's tactics, but an uncensored, fearless argument about what's right and real would go a long way toward countering a campaign of viciousness and sleight-of-hand.

 

[rgraham666]

A small point here shereads.

The Shrubbies are not conservatives, they're revolutionaries.

Nothing will be conserved if they get their way. A great deal will be destroyed though.

 

[shereads]

They are social conservatives, rg, of the meanest sort. As for the rest of what's traditionally been called political conservatism in this country, the neocons wear the label and there are plenty of people who don't know any better.