We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of
Newt Gingrich's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid
man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to
walk?


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...

Read the rest at

http://www.bopnews.com/archives/001512.html#001512