Garrison Keillor – 7/13/16

This page was last updated on August 27, 2016.

Ricky Raccoon for president; Gary Edward “Garrison” Keillor (GK) – The Washington Post; Beaver County Times; July 13, 2016.

The update of 8/27/16 corrected an errant link for “In its final report on E-mailgate, the FBI agreed.” The original link incorrectly pointed back to this review instead of my overview of Hillary Clinton’s E-mailgate.

Below is a critique of this column.

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“Back in college days, we literati felt superior to engineers in their high-water pants and half-rim horn-rims and plastic pocket protectors, people who wound up giving the world the little gizmo that is camera, compass, calendar, encyclopedia, weather monitor, newspaper and telephone, and what was our gift to the world? Unintelligible narcissism that called itself ‘poetry.’ I have just now asked my iPhone how many times did Rod Carew steal home. Answer: 17. Seven in 1969 alone. I saw him do it once. Talk about competence. He took a big lead off third, raced for home, dove for the plate, safe by inches. Chutzpah, timing, speed, and smarts, right there before your eyes.”

[RWC] That’s okay, by the 1970s, engineering students didn’t wear “high-water pants and half-rim horn-rims and plastic pocket protectors,” if they ever did. I’m glad the “literati” had time to feel superior to anyone. There is some truth to GK’s comment, however. While at PSU – Beaver for my freshman and sophomore years, engineering students were the single largest group. Other students weren’t a problem, non-technical instructors were because day in and day out they knew a big chunk of their students took their classes only because they were required for graduation.

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“Nowadays, the unintelligible narcissism is coming from the Big Snapper, now planning his coronation in Cleveland. He is entirely wrapped up in himself, like a raccoon trapped in a garbage can, and apparently uninterested in the realities of policy and politics, which unnerves old hands in the Republican Party, but what can they do? He came to political prominence in 2011 by insisting that Barack Obama is secretly a Kenyan, which appealed to a large segment of Republicans, the same ones who imagine that the government is sitting on a secret formula for turning tap water into fuel. From the Kenyan gambit, it was a short leap to proposing a wall on the Mexican border, paid for by the government of Mexico, and his reliable applause line, about stupid leaders making bad deals with other countries. It was good enough to beat the cast of wind-up candidates in the primaries and here he is.”

[RWC] GK appears to forget “insisting that Barack Obama is secretly a Kenyan” originated with Hillary Clinton (HRC) supporters during the 2008 primary season. According to FactCheck.org, President Obama’s “Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1984.”

“He still loves that line and the wall and he resists going into detail. It’s hard for a 70-year-old con man to become a statesman, as the retainers around him are coaxing him to be. Reality is a show, and wild conjecture and playground insult are his strong suits. He has gotten a long free ride on news shows on which anchors have treated him with solemn deference, the first albino raccoon to run for president. They ask him about national security and he yips and snaps and they nod and ask about the federal deficit. His platform, whatever it may be on any given day, is pure hokum. He is, as Mitt Romney points out, a fraud. Hillary Clinton has her faults and is no whiz at email, but she does not walk around arguing with lampposts. He’d be a disaster in the White House and after Bush II, who needs it? That is what the majority is thinking these days.”

[RWC] Note how GK scoots around HRC’s incredibly poor security judgment by claiming she “is no whiz at email.” In a previous review of E-mailgate, I wrote, “the true issue is not technical. The problem is judgment.” In its final report on E-mailgate, the FBI agreed.

If someone didn’t already know, E-mailgate showed one of HRC’s “faults” is she lies over and over. Below are more examples.

Multiple times HRC claimed she and her daughter flew into the Balkans under fire in 1996. HRC stopped telling the lie only when CBS videotapes and interviews with people who traveled with her proved she was lying.

HRC claimed she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first known climber to make it to the top of Mt. Everest. The problem is, HRC was born in 1947, nearly six years before Sir Edmund became famous for making this climb (1953). You can find a lot of detail on this at Snopes.com.

HRC claimed she was “instrumental” in the Northern Ireland peace process. The former Northern Ireland First Minister, Lord William Trimble, was quoted by the Daily Telegraph (UK) as saying, “I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around … being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.” Lord Trimble should know; he shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

HRC claimed daughter Chelsea was jogging in the vicinity of the World Trade Center and had just ducked into a coffee shop at the time of the 9/11 attacks. By Chelsea’s own account, she was in her apartment 12 blocks away and learned of the attack when her roommate called from work.

According to HRC during a Today interview of September 18, 2001, “She’d [daughter Chelsea] gone, what she thought would be just a great jog. She was going to go down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She went to get a cup of coffee and -- and that’s when the plane hit.” Jane Pauley then prompted, “She was close enough to hear the rumble.” HRC replied, “She did hear it.” Whatever her reason, it appears HRC wanted people to believe her daughter had been in danger as in the “flew into the Balkans under fire” tale.

Chelsea Clinton’s (CC) story differed from that of HRC, according to the UPI review of a piece CC wrote for Talk magazine (December 2001/January 2002). CC wrote, “When the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, I was 12 blocks away, (and) nothing has been the same since.” The UPI review said, “Clinton had been staying with her high school friend Nicole Davison in her apartment near Union Square for a few days in September before she went to England to study at Oxford. After they had coffee together, Davison went to work and Clinton returned to the apartment. Davison called Clinton with the news of the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. Clinton turned on the television and watched the second plane crash into the second WTC tower, and tried to reach her mother in Washington, but after speaking to her assistant, the phone line went dead. … Chelsea Clinton was downtown in line at a pay phone when she heard the rumble of the second tower collapsing.” HRC implied CC heard the rumble of the first tower collapsing, not the second.

HRC lied over and over about the Benghazi attack, claiming the attack was a peaceful demonstration gone awry. Alternatively, HRC blamed an irrelevant Internet video. Before the attack was over, however, those stories became a lie when everyone in a position to know came to learn the attack was a well-planned terrorist attack, likely by an al-Qaeda affiliate. In fairness to HRC, President Obama also lied about the Benghazi attack up through his UN speech of 9/25/12.

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“And meanwhile, Republicans are asking themselves how it happened that this freak was bestowed upon the national stage by their grand old party. Democrats have put forward candidates who lost spectacularly but we were never ashamed of them, they represented a strain, a tradition, of our particular circus. We never ran a raccoon for the presidency. We never put on a convention that our elders were too embarrassed to attend.”

[RWC] That Democrats like Mr. Keillor “were never ashamed of” any of their candidates says more about Democrat “literati” than their candidates.