[+] Garrison Keillor on the GOP: "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore"

by Garrison Keillor

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?

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.

[Thanks to friends who have forwarded this to me.
I've got a feeling this article is going to be
forwarded a lot in the next few weeks. I would
certainly encourage it.]