like cat turds in the moonlight

[Gerry Storm]

Real Good, Twisty. I'm passing it along to friends.
G


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Harry Edwards" <laughingwolf@ev1.net>
To: "ghetto survivors" <austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net>
Sent: Friday, September 03, 2004 12:16 PM
Subject: like cat turds in the moonlight


> Hypocrisy shines like cat turds in the moonlight.  -- Garrison Keillor
> 
> Read on, y'all.     twisty
> 
> 
>   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, 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.
> 
>   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>   Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion,
>   now in its 25th year on the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor's
>   new book, Homegrown Democrat (c 2004) is reprinted by arrangement with
>   Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
> 
> 
>