I feel unclean

I have just had the acute displeasure of witnessing Garrison Keillor vent his spleen in a personal, partisan rant. There's little to be said for his piece, other than it offers the genteel red-state Prairie Home Companion listener an opportunity to find out what Keillor really thinks about her. And about the Republican party in general, which he caricatures in a paragraph that starts:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists[...]

and on and on. I invite you to read that one paragraph of Keillor's piece at least, as a bridge to my paragraph holding up the funhouse mirror to Keillor's party:

The party of Roosevelt and Kennedy was transmogrified into the party of conspiracists and freeloaders, anti-American international socialist activists, health mullahs with PAC money, busybody atheists, race-baiting shakedown artists, Hollywood pseudo-intellectuals, overearnest un-funny commentators, multimillionaire senators, anti-smoking Nazis, rioting protectionists, trial lawyers, flacks, New-Age poseurs, ecoterrorists, and people who believe the Bush administration was complicit in and profited from the 9/11 attacks. In place of leaders they now offer a do-nothing senator whose main claims to fame are having opposed the vital defense bills of the last two decades, and having his lifestyle paid for by a succession of wealthy heiresses; a man suspicious of the free flow of capital and of religious institutions, whose philosophy is a pastiche of bumper sticker slogans masquerading as a platform. Democrats: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're coddled, corrupt and cowardly.

Do I feel some sense of achievement at meeting, or even one-upping Keillor in the field of partisan rancor? Pfffft. Heck no. Keillor's piece is vile crap. My paragraph above is just more crap with hyperlinks. At best it's a simple demonstration of how easy it is to paint with a broad brush and pretend that a party's most extreme hangers-on are representative of the mainstream. You'd think that Keillor would be worldly enough to recognize that his party is at least equally vulnerable to this kind of blunderbuss attack. Instead, he seems blinded by the idealistic notion that his side is untainted. How very silly.