By the way, where the hell is Park Place? Isn't that
in Atlantic City?
-sm
--- Sandy Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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 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,
> free lanceracists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking
> midgets of AM radio,
> tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brown shirts 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 drum beat 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.
>
>
>
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