It's from Garrison Keillor's latest book (1st 4 chapters here)

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 had 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 okay for reasonable people to vote Republican (even in the South), and 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 mightily and higher education burgeoned and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Much too much was made of Alger Hiss and the Hollywood Ten by lefties with a bad case of the yips. 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 famed for bold symbolic forays 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 Willie Horton ads of 1988. The flogging of the undeserving poor, the barely concealed racism, the drumbeat of diatribes against The Gummint. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who had risen to power on pure punk politics, nasty, violent, borderline psychopath. ``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, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys,-jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of-AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers,-taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom, panjandrums of Ponzi marketing and the grand pooh-bahs of Percodan, censors, spin dentists, Swiss bankers, hit men, body snatchers, mouth breathers and tongue thrusters, testosterone junkies, oversexed hedgehogs, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, randy preachers, marsupial moms and chirpy news anchors, UFO scholars, johns, shroomheads, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, wizened aliens, aluminum-siding salesmen, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, braying, smirking, scratching on the national blackboard, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-a-Sketch president with a voice like a dial tone, who for almost four years has looked as if he were just about to say something smart, not much introspection going on here, no inquiring minds eager to learn about the world, not much chance of anyone picking up a book that isn't on the official reading list and hearing a still small voice, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions in general, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body-parts trying to walk, supported by millions of good folks who do not share the anarchist dream but sleep well with this West Texas sphinx for a nightlight.

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

What gorgeous characters they have given us, a cast worthy of Dickens--the oily and toxic DeLay, the lubricious Lott, the bland and arrogant Dr. Frist, the shabby and devious Rove, the meathead Hastert, the squinty Rumsfeld, the stone-brained Cheney, and the tragic Powell, the Company Man Who Could Have Been Great, who was offered the mantle by all the polls but deferred to the Boss's Callow Son and vouched for him, the battlefield veteran defending the goldbricker, the bootstrap hero kneeling to the Young Pretender. Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Districts shaped like orthopedic devices! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in the committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Young Republicans ride the government gravy train! The train is full! More cars are added! 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, railing against the expense of public schools and calling for more prisons. Henry Mencken, you poisoned these boobs and they've come back hardier than ever. A whole new strain, more virulent than any previous. Every satirist who drew breath has flung pots of ink at this parade of tooting lummoxes and here it is come round again, marching down Main Street, rallying to the cause of William McKinley, hail, hail, the gang's all here, ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.

It's the natural cycle of life, I suppose, that conservatives become anarchists and liberals conservatives. Once we Democrats were young and rebellious and lobbed eggs at the bewigged and berobed Establishment and now we're the parents with the thankless job of home maintenance, defending principles that go back to the founding of the Republic, namely, the notion of the common good, the principle of equality, the very idea of representative government. We've become the tiresome, repetitive old dad who tells his boys that Progress Depends on Teamwork and All of Us Learning to Pull Together, while the Republicans have turned into the Screw You Party. They tore into the progressive income tax, raked the IRS over the coals for chasing down deadbeats, and succeeded in convincing the American people that they are overtaxed (compared to whom? Albania?), succeeded to the extent that 17% of Americans now believe it is justifiable to cheat on your income tax.

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 9/11/2001 in which nineteen men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House has fought to keep secret, even as it has run 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 so far. The top 1% holds nearly half of the financial wealth, the greatest concentration of wealth of any industrialized nation, more concentrated than at any time since the Depression. In 1980, on average, CEOs earned 42 times the salary of the average worker, and these days they earn about 476 times that salary. Since 1980, the rich have been getting richer fast and furiously and hard-working people in the middle are sliding down the greasy slope who never imagined this could happen to them. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humankind has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.

I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for. The people who call themselves conservatives stand for tax cuts, and further tax cuts, annual tax cuts, the only policy they know. Cut taxes. Use the refund to buy a gun and an attack dog to take with you when you drive your all-terrain vehicle through the barricades of Republicanville to make a foray into enemy territory to purchase supplies. They are leading this great land toward a Lost New World where Social Security and Medicare will be dim memories and America will be a series of malls connected by interstates, and people will live in walled compounds with moats, like in the Middle Ages.

Looking out over the land and realize it is our job to protect and respect this planet,the state of the world.

We need people whose hearts are full of pity and compassion for all of humankind,for the Earth and her state,for nature and its preservation and protection.

quote:

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We need people whose hearts are full of pity and compassion for all of humankind,for the Earth and her state,for nature and its preservation and protection.

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Or some of the fine surpervisors on the Bush energy team that made it possible to open up Wyoming's Upper Green Valley for oil and gas(for about a weeks worth) and now these lands will forever be trashed.

so Charlie tell me, what kind of stewards of the land do we need,in order to provide our generation and future generations with Safe drinking water..water not contaminated by this type of reckless developing of the land.

Land in Wyoming,Colorado,New Mexico,Montana, and Utah to name a few.

Ok, who's going to control the SNAKES?
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"It's not just environmentalists who are exercised about the abandonment of "mutiple use" and the sacrifice of public land and water.Powder River Basin ranchers have formed an alliance with environmentalists;together,they're suing the feds.

Also lining up with environmentalists are sportsman-Generally a conservative lot,easily seduced by politicians who dress in camo and flounce around at photo ops with borrowed shotguns and fishing rods.

They voted overwhelmingly for Bush after he'd gone bass fishing and dove hunting and after his campaign had told them Gore would take away their guns. But now they're having second thoughts."By Ted Williams
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Avid Sportsman Stoney Burk of Friends of the Rocky Mountain Front are angry about this."The public is being cut out. I voted for Bush. Now I'm ashamed I did.They have betrayed the confidence of millions of people...We're talking about an invasion of our last remaining wildlands,destruction of our last remaining fish and wildlife habitat. For what?"

Field and Stream..once most conservative..now warns of the dangers of the Bush Adm.on wildlife and safe water.

Everywhere they are breaking ground are those rubber dams to prevent runoff and pollution and in all the wet spots are signs with a pic of a bulldozer with a slash thru it saying something like; 'WETLANDS AREA KEEP OUT'.

I was speaking of bureaucrats in general, not just the environmental extremists
who would stop all commercial activity over a spotted owl or kangaroo rat or some such.

And I think most of them actually think they are actually protecting the public in some way.

Funny how my concern for environment and the clear abuse of power by this administration...turned into bureacrats and soup?

I was showing how Bushes Executive order has had terrible effects on wildlife,water, fish ,air quality just to name a few.

But I quess since you live in #1 place on earth you don't have to worry about these latest orders harming you...let them harm the rest of the country..you wouldn't care.

Now, that is really taking care of the earth and the future...got family?Do you care about others and the well being of our land for years to come..or is it ..as long as I am happy and I am taken care of ,this will never be my worry anyway attitude...Sadly this seems to be the norm, more and more...our country is doomed with people who rake the land and do not care for the land.

Hey ,don't worry about those owls anyways..they died from drinking the toxic water left over from the oil and gas explorations on these once treasured lands.Sadly, so will the people whos wells be ultimately be effected by these actions.

Meg:
By the way 3 great, my husband and I ranch in spotted owl country......welcome to off-topic!

You should really want to protect the land even more from acts such as these!

Some would surface with the look of shear fright on their faces...They had seen the HUGE catfish that were living in the depths of these murky underwater footings?

Imagine that LR..I'd high tail it up too if I saw one of those beautiful creatures staring at me!!! They aren't fish...they are pigs!!!w/whiskers!

Now on point:

I found you post most amusing at best, like most liberal writings it was mostly name calling and boo hooing sounding a lot like a child having a temper tantrum, though with a better vocabulary perhaps. It is almost always the same old "we hate Bush" rehetroitc. I wait with baited breath for the day a liberal actually offers a SOLUTION to a problem rather than just whines about the ones they see all around them. But wait the solution they ultimately offer is more goverment intrusion into private industry and private lives and that costs goverment money and the goverment gets that money from folks like me who didn't want the darned intrusion in the first place, so I am forced to pay for some dammed liberal program out of money I worked my butt off to earn? no thank you.

Oh, by the way, you being a computer person by trade should know this. When did your industry have it's greatest surge of growth and new product development??? Go one admit it, under Reagan. Why???? Because all those tax cuts he "gave to the rich" bennifited corporations and they had the money to reinvest in R&D and create all this wonderful technology we now almost take for granted. When did IBM almost go under???? Come on admit it.....Under who???? Bush Sr?? Why Tax increases and their impact on the economy....

This NONSECNE about 9-11 being the FIRST attack on US soil is starting to tick me off. I am so tired of liberals saying that. It was not. The first bombing of the WTC was. Why dont' the liberal media want people to know that??? Because if you started to know the truth about how many times we were attacked by terrorist the war on terror would start to seem justified. But to see a history of attacks on American interists by Islamic extremists you would have to go all the way back to Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbe Scottland, and nothing was done...till 9-11 then we finally fought back. There are four serious attacks on American interists that I can think of just from memory between these events that went unanswered. How much should we have continued to take???

Sent: said on other post that he lives off the government = hypcritical
HA HA HA HA

185 IQ? = doubtful

Sent et al and all,

This standard come back from staunch Bush supporters just doesn't come close to cutting it anymore.

It is blatantly ignorant of this writers points, and also of what has actually transpired over these past four years in particular.

It isn't surprising that immediate dissmissal and looking the other way is the position every Bush supporter takes ..but it is deeply disturbing that supporters are taking that position in light of these enourmous calamities..of the magnitude that party lines should mean nothing in acknowledging the mess we are all in.

Then, to top it all off..a leap is inevitably made to say the Liberals, or John Kerry himself don't have a solution up their sleeve, so all they are talking about, all these concerns are bunk...cuz they doin't themselves have a solution.

How one man, or even Liberals as a group..can be expected to have the big solution neatly laid out is utterly rediculous...and yet again completely ignoring the complexities and severity of the problems we now face as a direct result of this administration's actions!

Yet GWB and company are dead pan in their proclamation that THEY have the solution, without for one minute acknowledging the clear, MAJOR problems AT ALL. Their supporters follow suit in a dronelike fashion.

I'm not at all saying I think everything we have to face now is their fault, that these problems began with GWB..but there is no denying the past four years have been fillied with collosal mistakes, and not only no resolve, but clearly enourmous catastrophe...coming with financial and political gains for this administration borne out of disaster for rest of the World..including but not AT ALL limited to increased Terror threat.

Noone can deny that NOTHING has gotten better. SO very much is precipitously worse.

Enough is enough! Drop the party line, the weapons and armor.. and start thinking as human beings for a minute here.

Mo

begging your pardon but when did I ever say any such thing??? I do not "live off the goverment" in any way shape or form. I DO have a SSI case pending but that is MY money that was TAKEN BY FORCE from me and I WANT IT BACK now that I qualify for it. I am not on welfare, foodstamps or WIC. My rent is not paid by section eight or any other goverment programs. My health insurance is paid for by my wife's income and provided through her employer.

185 yes that was when I was in fifth grade, melted a few brain cells since then, lost a few to lyme mostly ones dealing with sequencing (notice spelling problems), but yes I would guess still in the high 170s easy. Like I mentioned just for fun one night that I couldn't sleep I went to Mensa's web site and took their "free practice test" and was just two or three questions short of qualifying, this was during a bad herx too and I hadn't slept in about three days. Plus as I am sure most of you know higher math is one of those things that if you don't do you forget how to. So I think it was the combination of the two things that stumped me. But I still dont want to be assoicated with that bunch of geeks, it really don't impress me, it just means you have good test taking skills that is all. I know some brilliant people who freeze on tests and some morons who flurish on test. Just look at all the ASE "Master mechaniacs" that can't change oil properly and you start to get an idea of what I am talking about.

But Mensa tests actual knowledge while IQ tests the ability to learn. So someone withh a high IQ may not actually know much because they haven't been taught much. I usually liken it to a computer. Someone with a "normal" IQ say 125 would be a Pentium with a 500 K Hard drive and someone with a higher IQ like a 180 would be like a Pentium 4 with a 40 gig hard drive. But now immagine that the pentium has it's hard drive almost full of useful programs while the pentium 4's hard drive is almost empty except for Word. Even though it is a much more powerful computer, capable of doing more it is still basically just a wordprocessor while the pentium though just "average" is quite a lot more useful because it has been programed with so much more info. So the same is with IQ numbers, which explains why 286dx modles like Jimmy Carter get elected (sorry couldn't resist)

But I do try to type slowly so you can read what I post and I try to use simple statements. But alas even still I am misunderstood and mis quoted and few get my points.

So you want MY solutions to the problems??? What a foolish question. I am not running for office. I don't pretend to have them, but will only tell you if you elect me. I agree with the agressive posture this nation has finaly taken against terrorisim, how many strikes does it take for us to strike back????Must I list them again????

I am glad Jr. finally finished the job dad didn't have the chuptuza to do. I am SO GLAD UBL is the SOB hiding and cowering for his life and not me and my family. I hope and wish he wakes every night in cold sweats thinking the commandos are getting him, and one night, not too far off, it will not be just another nightmare.

I agree with the tax breaks W has given to corporations they are insentive to do reaserach and development as well as expansion. These tax breaks have helped big companies as well as small companies. How do I know??? I deal with people all day long and I hear their stories.

The "tax breaks for only the richest of americans" as Kerry is so fond of saying is a pile of bull. The EIC I got back was over fourthousand dollars. Thank you GEORGE. Kerry wants to REPEAL THAT!! and he thinks that is going to win my vote?????

Slowly but surely we should beging to dismantle the security council unless they grow some teeth. Their resolutions mean nothing is there is no action to back up what is passed.

We should have more political say how our aid money is spent in forigen countries. They curse us to the world but put out their hands in need. We should have more stringent requirements for giving aid, as a nation.

We should do everything in our power to help secure a peaceful Israel, even if it means gastapo type raids in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This has got to end. I would make it part of the "Global war on terror"

I would reinstitute the draft for men not entering college (watch college attendance go up). Everyone enjoys the freedoms of this country it is about time they learn what it takes to maintain that freedom.

But hey that is why I am not running for office, I haven't even gotten into my more "conterversal" issues.

A good start might be to NOT roll back the long standing environmental protections that have worked so well for the past 20 years or so, but that is exactly what Bush is doing.

We will all have the air quality of Houston (the worst in the country now--passing LA)

Lucky Americans!!!

Yes. Trust the industries to regulate themselves. They do such a good job.

The Susquehanna river running through shoprat's home town is now clean enough to swim in, and even eat the occasional fish caught in it's once sparkling waters.

When I first moved here around 1980, the river was filthy. Dip a hand in and it'd come out brown and smelly.

Well, another four years of Bush, and we may have our brown smelly water again.

Is this the fourth or fifth circle of hell?

shoprite

you are so misinformed about so many things--I just can't keep up. Plus you never pay a whit of attention to what I say anyway.

But I MUST comment on this:

The "tax breaks for only the richest of americans" as Kerry is so fond of saying is a pile of bull. The EIC I got back was over fourthousand dollars. Thank you GEORGE. Kerry wants to REPEAL THAT!! and he thinks that is going to win my vote?????

as it is sooooo 100% wrong. Kerry will repeal the tax cuts for those making over $200,000 in personal income per year.

Do you make more than $200,000 a year?
If you do you wouldn't be eligeible for the EIC, which Kerry actually wants to expand to include more middle income families.

The Bush tax breaks had nada to do with the EIC.

Once again:
Kerry will allow the Bush tax cuts for all of us making less than $200,000 per year to stand. Only those earning over $200,000 per year will lose the tax cut.

If I keep writing it over and over and over will it eventually seep into some of the locked tight brains here?

Naw!!!

shopfutility

Picking just one for tonight..

**IF** we were actually fighting for freedom, if this was a TRUE (fom the top) goal ..and result..
supporting the idea that very young men and women dying and otherwise giving their lives(and future health and welfare in most cases) for our country might have been a point worthy of discussion.

Mo