The Minnesota humorist is on the warpath again, oozing his usual hate, attacking Republicans as no less than murderers.  Why is this not surprising?

They get loonier and loonier, the yelping of the far Left, such as Garrison Keillor's, calling for (just kidding!) denying health care for Republicans or, for that matter, anyone who disagrees with their pining for the government take-over of the nation's health care.

Darn Republicans. If only they were killed off, all of them, as Shakespeare had it in for lawyers, and along with them, take the wealthy people to boot. Heck, game-changing liberals then could reshape the nation into their dreamworld socialist nanny state, and everything would be hunky dory. Fade to eternal happiness, bliss, and bright sunshiny days forevermore.

Keillor's latest stab at political humor appears in his syndicated column tackling — if that is the word — the health care issue. But it is not about health care, is it? It's about health care insurance. It's how to pay for it, silly.

"One starts to wonder," deadpans Keillor, "if the country wouldn't be better off without them [Republicans] . . . if they should be cut out of the health care system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer."

This couth-free statement, even if in jest, wades into a hate-filled swamp. Same putrid waters infested by Representative Allan Grayson (D-FL), who on September 30 on the House floor, called Republicans would-be murderers, all of them, of senior citizens.

During his floor speech to an empty chamber, televised and aided by flippant flip charts, Representative Grayson asserted the GOP "plan" consists of "Part One, Don't Get Sick." Then, flipping to a new chart, he dives deeper into the slime, with his "Part Two, If You Do Get Sick, Die Quickly." Ouch! That hurts.  (Yours truly is a senior, a codger.)

Was it a Saturday Night Live sketch? A put-on?  Or reality? Did Representative Grayson say that, or was it daffy comic Al Franken in disguise? Stuart Smiley on a tear? No, it was vintage Leftist animosity, juvenile, clownish, spiteful and yes, false, too. Anything goes? As if to reaffirm his outrageous thesis, Representative Grayson followed with this line — and I swear, I am NOT making this up, Boy Scout's honor, right hand raised to God:

"Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick. This is what the Republicans want you to do," he added.

Calls naturally followed for Grayson to apologize, as Democrats demanded of Representative Joe ("you lie") Wilson, but went unheard. Silence of the liberals is deafening, again revealing a shameless hypocrisy.  Double standards, anyone?

Keillor, Minnesota-bred humorist, says health care battles are ". . . mostly instigated by shrieking ninnies and pompous blowhards." (Well, no one said he wasn't clever with the English language.) Keillor describes the GOP wrongly as ". . . a major party that has excused itself from meaningful debate." How deliciously ironic, when the opposite is true. (George Orwell lives!  Mangling of our language, to mean what you want it to mean, is politically in vogue.) 

If you disagree, you are excused from the table of One-Worlders, linear thinkers, reality alterers and revisionist believers in all things liberal, also called shibboleths.

Bitter prattle from the Left, yes, it's all of that, but cutting off "Rs" from health care?  Wow! How Draconian is that? Okay, so it's a lame(brain) joke. One might as well accuse Republicans, heartless bastards, of endorsing the use of E.coli-infected meats, all the better for manufacturers to kill unsuspecting kids at fast-food hamburger joints.

WAIT! Keillor does just that. Says he in his latest tirade: "They [Republicans] are dead-set against government regulation . . . and do not mind manufacturing hamburger patties contaminated by E.coli . . ." Oh, really? Do not mind WHAT? It gets no lower than that, folks, the level of political shame.  

Oozing hatred is the Left's "thing," perhaps embedded in its collective psyche. Grayson, Keillor and a host of ugly-speaking others exemplify slime-ball tactics way out of bounds in any civil, rational discussion. Their crap — frankly, that — is picked up by other loony tunes, and young people, and coarseness proceeds from there.

Not even close to a kinder, gentler society is the result, nor is discussion encouraged. Just name-toss. No wonder rough edges abound in today's vile name-calling world and  putting folks in partisan-made little boxes.

The party base – in more ways than one, the base — picks up the excrement, and recycles it — say, in blogs such as Media Matters.  The trash redistributed 7/24 is designed to destroy, not to enlighten, and to flatten (i.e, to suppress) any other view. In truth, it is to stifle debate, not very democratic (with a small "d").  And that, gentle readers, is the mark of ideological tyrants throughout all history.  Heck, you could look it up.

In my slap-happy 2004 review of my University of Minnesota classmate's Homegrown Democrat, a cynical and hateful tome, I detect a shrewd tackiness, lack of full reasoning power, blindness triggered by partisan rage. It sacrifices truth and substance for sassy, "cute," juvenile premises taken straight from Democrat talking points. All the more to please the liberal mobs, seeking scalps of all who Disagree. And maybe, just maybe, to sell more books. It was not, certainly, a book designed to serve truth, or any sense fair play. What? Give the sucker a break (W.C. Fields). 

Republicans, wrote Keillor in Homegrown, are among other evils:  ". . . Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, tax cheats, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists [and] genteel pornographers." Pornographers?  And "Nihilists in Golf Pants."  Fore! 

Get the idea he pathologically abhors Republicans?  Is it a sickness unto death?

Such garbage passes for humor, supposedly, among the myopic mindless swamp followers, a group unto itself, I think, struggling to find identity, or Something Big.  Their devotion to spreading trashy, nasty, untrue charges reveals a meanness of spirit,  inexcusable distaste for civility – indeed, a disdain for basic honesty. Maybe they have fooled themselves by adopting Keillor's toxic blend of hatred and left-wing paranoia. It's a wonder he can put it on the shelf when doing NPR's "Prairie Home Companion" gigs.

Who's doing the "shrieking"? Gary Keillor (name before his affected name change for his early New Yorker prose) need only to look in a mirror. Likely he came upon his loathsome hatred (self-hatred, too?) for anything Right of Center, after long practice, at the feet of our well-meaning, savvy, but mostly left-leaning profs at the University of Minnesota in the Sixties. (Yes, Sixties! Keillor is now a geezer, too. Some grow mellower with age, seasoned with life's experiences. Not he.)

Keillor is darling of know-it-all leftist academia, and its handmaidens, some say henchmen, Big Media. Reviewers mainly love his trite tripe. As to his political beliefs, they seem to revolve vaguely around the Idea that Someone, Somewhere Out There, at Sometime (maybe, under Obama, soon?) will take care of us, cradle to grave. Say, ahhh, in the form of Big (Brother) Government. ("Soma tablets," sans prescription, for all in a beauteous, brave new world. Nirvana!)

Keillor's animus, staged or not, is unfunny except among fellow travelers, insiders of the reputed "jokes," based on the base-level kinship of the liberal brotherhood of hate from which nothing good can emanate, as C.S. Lewis was kind enough to point out in The Screwtape Letters. "There is wishful thinking in Hell," Lewis wrote, "as well on on Earth." 

A psychiatrist's couch might be a good starting point for Keillor, even at his advanced age, to deal with his demon Republicans. They must fly in bat-like in the shadows of his heart-of-darkness nightmares to serve his hate-spewing for the next column. Republicans are his bogeymen, his strawmen, haunting him, revealing his own inner warts and fears, and plumb the very depth of his enormous, perhaps pathological intolerance.

If only he had stuck with Lake Wobegon topics, his above-average, often delightful material, not gutter-level political drivel.  For one thing, he'd be more respected, less absurd, less the butt of jokes himself, as a loco liberal. As it is, his legacy will be tainted with his cranky image of a Look-at-Me weirdo, ego-driven, not familiar with truth, a spewer of hatred in the guise of humor, wanderer straight out of the theater of the absurd. Waiting, maybe, for Godot?

Breaking News!: Keillor's Unapologetic Response

Stung by reader (and editors'?) criticism, Keillor in his next syndicated column offers a sort-of response to his cheap-shot column assailing Republicans.

"OK, it was wrong of me to say last week that we should deny health care to Republicans . . . and thank you to many readers who kindly took me to task. It was so wrong."

Note, no apology. "It" was wrong. Not he. True to form, clueless, he goes on slamming Republicans again, this time as "mostly about maximizing profit in the short run . . . who buy a healthy company and then sink it under an enormous debt load that goes to pay them a vast profit . . . and the creditors [also Republicans?] get shafted." Got all that? 

Then comes his God-awful vulgar notion that Republicans endorse poisoning of foodstuffs, injecting our Whoppers and Big Macs with the deadly E.coli virus. Friends, it does not get any lower than that for the swamp man, Keillor.

Ordinary folks, above average, blessed with Minnesota Nice where I live, with a classy civility about them he lacks, wonder why his invective, why the malice toward Rs. Is there a special place in hell, maybe purgatory in a pinch, awaiting such boorish hate-inducers? Read his columns if you doubt whence hate begins, and know it tolls for thee. If you are a damn Republican, that is. All Democrats receive free passes.