Category: default || By jt3y

(Editor's Note: There's something local at the end. Otherwise, this is another dispatch from the Tube City Almanac National Affairs Desk. If you're not interested in my tedious, namby-pamby politics, jump to the bottom.)

Still waters run deep out in Minnesota (get it? Stillwater? Ha ha), where the Gopher State's two best known humorists are taking shots at the current political climate.

In this corner, in the blue trunks, originally from Anoka, Minn., it's Garrison Keillor, the "Lake Wobegon Kid"! And in this corner, in the red trunks, from Fargo, N.D., but now hanging his hat in Minneapolis, it's "Boy Bleat," James Lileks!

OK, fellas, you know the drill: droll phrases; solemn profundities; dry, acerbic wit; and self-deprecation are all allowed. No hitting below the belt, and no clutching. Now, go back into your corners and come out writing!

(BONG!)

And Lileks comes out swinging that mean right cross, and he steadily pounds away at the big, fleshy middle in his syndicated column for Newhouse News Service:

Do you suffer from Sudden Bush Hatred Fatigue Syndrome? It's easy to diagnose. It often strikes at a bookstore. You walk in looking for a breezy summer read, and piled near the door are stacks and stacks of angry tomes about the perfidy of Usurper Bush. ....

It's hard to tell how SBHFS will affect the vote. This group could go either way. They could so weary of the incessant hysteria that they'll be willing to reward the frothers, if only to shut them up. If I vote for John Kerry, will you be happy? Will that do it? The answer would be Yes! That'll do it!

Well, that, and nationalized health care, tax hikes on small businesses, the Kyoto treaty, fealty to the United Nations, shipping nuclear fuel to the Iranians to make them act nice, leaving Iraq ASAP and ushering in what Kerry calls a more "sensitive" war on terrorism. (We will use marshmallow bullets, perhaps.) All that plus vast federally funded embryo farms, and they'll be happy. For a while. Then we'll have to do something about that "In God We Trust" nonsense on the coins.

Ooh! Look at the way he comes in for the attack ... right jab! Upper-cut! Sarcastic putdown! Right jab! That Boy Bleat is good!

But wait, here comes Keillor, that wiley old veteran, pounding back in Salon, and he leads with a jab toward the middle, and then he swings back around with a vicious left cross:

Richard Nixon was a good deal responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency and the push to clean up the Great Lakes. The conservation movement that paved the way, so to speak, for the whole Green agenda was very much a Republican thing. The Americans With Disabilities Act, which gave us Handi-vans and wheelchair-accessible facilities and those little ramps carved into the curbs, was brought about by Republicans (and Democrats). Republicans have been good critics of government, and good satirists at times. Republican libertarianism is a useful antidote to our Democratic/neurotic tendency to want to put up a warning sign on uneven terrain and make cowboys do their whooping in designated whooping areas. Republicans used to contribute a lot, back before they let the fanatics and teeth grinders take over and turn their party into the Leave Me Alone party, intent on proving that government is inherently inept, and they've done such damage to America in the past decade that will take a century of saints to fix.

Oof! But Lileks can take this kind of punishment from the Wobegon Kid:

You wander over to periodicals and flip open the current Esquire. There's a story on stem-cell research. The author's subtitle: "How the president is trying to kill my daughter."

Yes, of course, you think. (How weary your inner voice sounds.) That's precisely what he is trying to do. That is the president's specific objective in life: Kill sick people. It makes him happy. Every night he puts his cloven hooves up on the desk and thinks of the people he's offed today. Ahh. Life is good.

And Keillor comes back, he's just boring in, like a public radio fundraiser in full pledge-drive mode:

President Bush was campaigning on Wednesday here in St. Paul and he sounded awfully loopy, like an old camp counselor who's done too many campfires. According to him, we're bringing democracy to the Middle East and the economy is turning the corner. He said it about 10 times, in those tiny mincing sentences of his, and there isn't anybody over the age of 12 who really believes him.

Oh, for the love of God, isn't someone going to stop this fight! Ladies and gentlemen, I can't bear to watch!

Ahem. I also can't bear to keep up the 1940s boxing shtick.

I like and admire both Keillor --- who I've been reading since junior high school --- and Lileks, who I discovered a few years ago via the Web. They actually have a fair amount in common; they both write non-fiction and fiction, and they both do radio. They're not perfect: Keillor's radio show is a little too precious and self-indulgent at times --- please, no more singing, Garrison --- and Lileks' sometimes knee-jerk conservatism can be tiresome.

I'm also enough of a mushy-headed simp to be able to agree with both of them. The foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Bush crowd is doing more harm than good to their own cause. Lileks has nailed the display at your local chain bookstores: On one side are books aimed at the baby-killing, gun-toting, fascist, theocratic mouth-breathers; and the other side are books for French-loving, godless communistic Saddam-appeasing terrorism lovers. Or maybe it's the other way around. I browsed through some of these books the other day at the Barnes & Noble in Homestead, and it almost put me off of my feed. If it wasn't Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter's smug mugs leering out at me, it was a half-dozen "humorous" compilations of the President's malaprops ("Look! Here, he mispronounces the name of the president of Turkmenistan!"). I read through a few of them before my hands became too grubby to hold them any longer; after 15 minutes of scrubbing under hot water, the slime still wouldn't come off.

But I agree with Keillor, too: Many of the Republicans on the national stage have gone right past Reagan's pragmatic conservatism and become members of the Know-Nothing Party. They make appeals to blue-collar populism, and then go around kicking working men and women in the slats. If you're one of the 6.5 million people who lost your overtime today, including many of my friends in the newspaper business, you can thank the President, who pushed through a revision of the Fair Wage Standards Act over the objections of both Democrats and Republicans. They wrap themselves in the flag and stand in front of military installations to show how tough they are on terrorism, but don't mention that many Army, Navy and Air Force careerists are living on food stamps, or that they've kicked thousands of veterans out of the VA medical system.

I'm not going to go as far as some people, and say there's no difference between the parties, or the candidates. There are very clear differences, now more than ever. (On the other hand, I don't agree with the pundits and partisans who are running around calling this "the most important election of our lifetimes" --- the 1976 election, coming two years after a president had resigned in disgrace, was pretty important, too.)

Somewhere along the line, the extremists on both sides hijacked the parties. I'm a pro-life Catholic, but I'm also a supporter of organized labor. I believe that people should be allowed to own handguns, but I also believe in civil rights and civil liberties. I like big V-8 powered cars that go fast, but I also think more money should be spent on mass transit. I believe in free markets, with sensible regulations to protect the public. Where does that leave me?

Put another way: Where would John F. Kennedy fit if he were alive today? He cut taxes on the wealthy and built up the military, and he would have been solidly against abortion. There's no way in hell that big Democratic donors would have supported him --- look at the way they abandoned Ron Klink when he ran against Rick Santorum.

As for Richard Nixon, he was an internationalist who implemented wage and price controls and (as Keillor pointed out) created the EPA --- and Amtrak. Dubya would rather swallow a bag of pretzels whole than support mass transit or consumer protection. As for the neo-cons, Grover Norquist Jr. and Ralph Reed would be working on dirty trick campaigns against Nixon, not for him.

When Nixon starts to look like a liberal, you have to admit that something is seriously wrong with national politics.

...

Now, as promised, it's time for the quick brief from the local news desk, as we learn from Karen Ferrick-Roman in the Beaver County Times that US Airways executives speak with forked tongues:

Without concessions from its employees within the next month, the airline's chairman said last week, the company could be liquidated and its assets sold. A couple of days later, the airline's chief executive officer said bankruptcy is a possibility, but not "an imminent shutdown, a disruption of service or impending liquidation."

And today, the airline is expected to announce its expansion in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"One minute we're going out of business. The next minute we're expanding in Fort Lauderdale," said Teddy Xidas, president of the Pittsburgh local of the Association of Flight Attendants. ...

"If you're looking to terminate pension plans and freeze pension payments, where do you get the money to expand? I don't understand it. It's so confusing to the employees."

Maybe we've all been underestimating US Airways' managers. Maybe when people call them craven and incompetent, they're wholly misjudging them.

Perhaps they just think outside the box! Perhaps, just like the protagonists in a bad movie, they're doing things that are so crazy, they just might work!

I believe it could be true!

On the other hand, I wouldn't discard the craven and incompetent thing just yet.