Gingersnap
01-20-2010, 01:55 PM
Note to Tea Partiers: Wake up and Smell the Coffee
Keillor, Garrison
January 19, 2010
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The tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don't have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms -- we prefer to sit quietly with coffee in hand and read a reliable newspaper and try to figure out what's going on in the world. Great heaps of dead bodies are moved by front-loaders and dumped, uncounted, unidentified, into open pits in a stricken country while people feast and walk treadmills on enormous cruise ships sailing a hundred miles off the coast en route to the Bahamas and Jamaica. That's the real world, not the paranoid hallucinations of the right.
The problem for Democrats right now is that nobody can explain health-care reform in plain English, 50 words or less. It's all too murky. The price of constructing this intricate web of compromises for the benefit of Republican senators (who then decided to quit the game and sit on their thumbs) is a bill with strange hair and ill-fitting clothes that you hesitate to bring home to Mother. Like all murky stuff, it is liable to strike people as dangerous or unreliable. And demagogues thrive in dim light.
The basic question is simple: Should health care be a basic right or is it a privilege for those who can afford it? Rush says it's a privilege -- pay or die -- and for his colonoscopy, they use a golden probe with a diamond tip, but most Americans agree that health care is basic, like education or decent roads or clean water. Holy Scripture would seem to point us in that direction. And yet the churches, so far as I can see, have chosen to stay aloof from this issue. Churches that feed the hungry and house the homeless dare not offend the conservatives in their midst by suggesting that we also tend the sick. And the opposition has beaten on garbage cans and whooped and yelled and alarmed the populace, which they're quite good at. These people look at a clear blue sky and see a conspiracy.
Much more at the link. I don't quite know how Keillor got a reputation for political/cultural insight. His lake Woebegone stuff amused a large number of people but I always thought it was fairly close to contemptuous. I never got the feeling that Keillor actually liked his fictional characters, I thought he found them useful as a foil for barely disguised hipster sensibility. Keillor is the kind of guy who will talk about you when you leave the room - and he'll have them laughing like loons at your expense.
This piece is typical of his views. He denigrates those who disagree with him and he twists Christianity into a political tool. Like a lot on the left, he's mesmerized by the false dilemma: cruise ships or rescue efforts, gold-plated medical procedures or basic services.
Too bad there's no comment field enabled.
Chicago Trib (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-201001191258tmsgkeillorctngk-a20100119jan19,0,5912997.story)
Keillor, Garrison
January 19, 2010
E-mail Print Share Text Size
The tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don't have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms -- we prefer to sit quietly with coffee in hand and read a reliable newspaper and try to figure out what's going on in the world. Great heaps of dead bodies are moved by front-loaders and dumped, uncounted, unidentified, into open pits in a stricken country while people feast and walk treadmills on enormous cruise ships sailing a hundred miles off the coast en route to the Bahamas and Jamaica. That's the real world, not the paranoid hallucinations of the right.
The problem for Democrats right now is that nobody can explain health-care reform in plain English, 50 words or less. It's all too murky. The price of constructing this intricate web of compromises for the benefit of Republican senators (who then decided to quit the game and sit on their thumbs) is a bill with strange hair and ill-fitting clothes that you hesitate to bring home to Mother. Like all murky stuff, it is liable to strike people as dangerous or unreliable. And demagogues thrive in dim light.
The basic question is simple: Should health care be a basic right or is it a privilege for those who can afford it? Rush says it's a privilege -- pay or die -- and for his colonoscopy, they use a golden probe with a diamond tip, but most Americans agree that health care is basic, like education or decent roads or clean water. Holy Scripture would seem to point us in that direction. And yet the churches, so far as I can see, have chosen to stay aloof from this issue. Churches that feed the hungry and house the homeless dare not offend the conservatives in their midst by suggesting that we also tend the sick. And the opposition has beaten on garbage cans and whooped and yelled and alarmed the populace, which they're quite good at. These people look at a clear blue sky and see a conspiracy.
Much more at the link. I don't quite know how Keillor got a reputation for political/cultural insight. His lake Woebegone stuff amused a large number of people but I always thought it was fairly close to contemptuous. I never got the feeling that Keillor actually liked his fictional characters, I thought he found them useful as a foil for barely disguised hipster sensibility. Keillor is the kind of guy who will talk about you when you leave the room - and he'll have them laughing like loons at your expense.
This piece is typical of his views. He denigrates those who disagree with him and he twists Christianity into a political tool. Like a lot on the left, he's mesmerized by the false dilemma: cruise ships or rescue efforts, gold-plated medical procedures or basic services.
Too bad there's no comment field enabled.
Chicago Trib (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-201001191258tmsgkeillorctngk-a20100119jan19,0,5912997.story)