Garrison Keillor: A PLAN TO SAVE THE COUNTRY

A plan to save the country
By Garrison Keillor
Originally published August 31, 2006

...................

This week, we mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Current Occupant's line, "You're doing a heckuva job," which already is in common usage, a joke, a euphemism for utter ineptitude. It's sure to wind up in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a summation of his occupancy.

Annual interest on the national debt now exceeds all government welfare programs combined. We'll be in Iraq for years to come. Hard choices need to be made, and given the situation we're in, I think we must bite the bullet and say no more health care for card-carrying Republicans. It just doesn't make sense to invest in longevity for people who don't believe in the future. Let them try faith-based medicine, let them pray for their arteries to be reamed and their hips to be restored, and leave science to the rest of us.

Cutting out health care to one-third of the population - the folks with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who still believe the man is doing a heckuva job - will save enough money to pay off the national debt, not a bad legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said, let them die and reduce the surplus population. In return, we can offer them a reduction in the estate tax. All in favor, blow your nose.


more at:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.keillor31aug31,0,3109222.story

:)

myself bursting out laughing to his Lake Walbegon stories. I hope I spelled the name of his lake correctly. He sure makes sense doesn't he.

But the more I read him, the more I like him. What a great column! Thanks for posting.

Except that in "A modest proposal," the Irish Swift proposed skinning for gloves (BLATANT dark satire) were worthy of sympathy and help.

I almost wish for a new "Communism," so that these swine may be purged from the body politic.

Yeah, I know, that's not nice or desirable or egalitarian. Screw it. I no longer cultivate the friendship or even the company of supporters of the Pig Bush. Sometimes, you just have to cull the diseased birds from the flock.

Yes, Keillor is our Swift; and a hearty yes to culling!

No sense in pretending "we're all in this together," blah blah blah. They know it's not true. Time Dems figured it out, too.

Right wing culture is a sewer. Our political and cultural task in the coming years is septic.

"It just doesn't make sense to invest in longevity for people who don't believe in the future."

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I love Garrison Keillor! :yourock:

No, I really mean it.
:thumbsup:

Excellent book. Fun and thought provoking, it will make you proud of who you are and why you're a Democrat.

Every chapter starts with a limerick. Here's Chapter 6's:

As a youth, our president, George,
Spent summer nights on the front porch,
Giving wedgies and hickeys
And drinking gin rickeys
And lighting his farts with a torch.


Chapter 11 is titled "The Good Democrat". Here's an excerpt:

"We are all, God bless us, uniquely ordinary and rise up in the morning and wash our faces and pull our pants on, and it would be nice to eat a breakfast that isn't full of poisons, send our children off to a good school, ride a safe bus to work at a building that complies with health laws, and use a cell phone that won't give us brain cancer. We'd like our employer to treat us fairly according to accepted practice. We'd like the police to guard the city against predators and vandals. We'd like to imagine that city officials are visionary and honest and committed to the common good and not in the pocket of the power company. We'd like to think that people in trouble get rescued. This is the Democratic view. We prefer the secular society to one in which persons of unpopular beliefs are ostracized, and we don't make the American flag into the Shroud of Turin, and we refuse to be cowed by our own government, and the sexual lives of our neighbors are not of profound interest. Republicans are troubled by homosexuality and can't figure out how not to think about it. Hunger and homelessness don't get their attention but the sight of two women kissing gets Republicans all buzzed, what a porch light does for moths. Democrats care more about health care and other staples of middle-class ife. You drive out of St. Paul into the Republican suburbs and you see what the New Deal and Fair Deal and Great Society accomplished: they enabled people of modest means to get a leg up in the world and eventually become right-wing reactionaries and pretend that they sprang fully formed from their own ambitions with no help from anybody. And vote to deny to others what they themselves were freely given. Bless their hearts, they are some of the meanest folks you'd ever want not to live next to, and their legacy will be a rat's nest of problems."