Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne’er-do-well son of the old Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no cost to yourself — one stink bomb after another, and now Governor Palin.
She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain’s first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for forty grand a pop, and she’ll become a trivia question, “What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?” And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.
Your broker kept saying, “Stay with the portfolio, don’t jump ship,” and you felt a strong urge to dump the stocks and get into the money market where at least you’re not going to lose your shirt, but you didn’t do it and didn’t do it, and now you’re holding a big bag of brown bananas. Me, too. But at least I know enough not to believe desperate people who are talking trash. Anybody who got whacked last week and still thinks McCain-Palin is going to lead us out of the swamp and not into a war with Iran is beyond persuasion in the English language. They’ll need to lose their homes and be out on the street in a cold hard rain before they connect the dots.
garrison keillor on sarah palin
October 12, 2008 by angryxer
Wow, that guy can write–it’s worth linking through to the original piece and reading it through,
Keillor is able to express conservative ideals in a way that is accessible to an old dyed-in-the-wool liberal like me. He is also able to criticize conservative leaders in a way that carries much more conviction. It’s hard for me to feel betrayed by Bush when all along he’s acted as I expected him to. It’s hard for me to express anything but bemused contempt for Palin, and for McCain in selecting her, but Keillor explains both why she was chosen and why it was wrong.
Thanks, Tom– I did read the whole thing, and the link is there, in the first word of the excerpt.
Keillor is great, and I’m glad he’s writing about this, because his appeal cuts across middle America, which Republicans like to exploit for their own purposes so often without providing any helpful governance in return.
I lived in MN for a few years, and given the disturbing right tilt the state has taken in the past decade, they can surely use a little Wobegone nudge where Election 08 is concerned.