In an article from August 2004, he writes about the the big change between the integrity of Eisenhower and the mucky swamp life that is now controlling the country in the name of the Republican Party. Now, as we usually understand it the Republicans have been the party of business, but the "me me me" selfishness that has turned them against the American people has reached a depraved all time low. Keillor paints a colorful picture of the change from ernest businessman to the depraved and debauched individuals we now contend with. The Goldwater loss in 1964 that really got them going to change the public dialog has reaped far more than they dreamed, their damnation.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/979/"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.
....
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous."
...
and so cogently:
"The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good."
It's a good read and may put some perspective on why so many Republicans have gone along with this travesty of government. They may be like the frog that will jump out of a pot of boiling water it is suddenly put into, but if it is in the water and the heat is ever so slowly turned up, you can cook him alive quite nicely. But if these folks hadn't abandoned every vestigial progressive ideal, this neocon corporate coup wouldn't have happened, at least as easily as it did.
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