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Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time...

He's kidding, right?

Probably half kidding. He may have been amusing himself, employing broad strokes to paint - to his mind, anyway - small truths.

Alan, why do you presume he's kidding? Things like that Baptist congregation throwing out its Democrats do not sound American to me.

....then again, they don't sound like the Republican Party of Eisenhower or even Bush Senior either. But the old-line Republicans did make a terrible bargain with religious fanatics. At least it seems some elements of the party leadership are now starting to regret it.

Alan, why do you presume he's kidding?

I don't presume - I hope. Take those first two sentences, reverse the political polarity, and you've got ... Ann Coulter. Is this the kind of thing you'd be proud to be associated with? Is this the kind of thing The Nation wants to be judged by?

Keillor thinks Republicans are small minded, Liberals broad minded (I'm still interested that it's Republicans and Liberals - no mention of Democrats).

Ann Coulter: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

"Liberals are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Conservatives actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time." Sorry Bobby, that's classic Coulter.

'Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them.'

Why can't this rich boy just play the banjo?

Sorry Bobby, that's classic Coulter.

And it's obviously just as applicable.

It is easy to switch the labels, but classic Coulter wouldn’t write the liberals “don’t feel comfortable in America…” She’d write “liberals hate America” (she titled a January piece, Liberals Love America Like O.J. Loved Nicole).

And there you have the difference. Coulter is in the business of hating her enemies. Keillor is in another business, that of having fun; and although he sometimes spirals into a bit of name-calling, he comes off as having at least a shred of affection for his targets. There’s this from the same article:

I enjoy, in small doses, the over-the-top right-wingers who have leaked into AM radio on all sides in the past twenty years. They are evil, lying, cynical bastards who are out to destroy the country I love and turn it into a banana republic, but hey, nobody's perfect. And now that their man is re-elected and they have nice majorities in the House and Senate, they are hunters in search of diminishing prey. There just aren't many of us liberals worth banging away at, but God bless them, they keep on coming.

There’s some venom there, but not the lethal kind.

To Coulter, a liberal is a baby-killer, a traitor, a pervert. Keillor sees conservatives as those neighbors who make you nervous. Coulter is angry, Keillor’s just weary.

... in other words, jeez, it's only in fun, wherzyasensayuma? Which is more or less where I came in, though Martha for one didn't seem to get the joke. I'm not sure I do either, though for different reasons.

It's hard to laugh when one's country is becoming less recognizable every day. I know hilarity is a useful psychological remedy and in its own way a fine form of revenge, but it isn't easy to maintain.

Oh, look, there's an armed thug on the border with my governor's blessing on his head and a "Liberal Hunting License" sticker on his truck. How cute, he's joking in public about wanting to kill me and my family and friends, and nobody's objecting. How silly. How funny. Ain't it a gas. Well, I guess it takes all kinds to make a world. Pass the popcorn...

Besides which: I think people are lately finding it too easy to pretend that if a liberal speaks angrily, then the liberal is no more than an identical mirror image to a right-wing zealot who is also speaking angrily. Lost is the question of which speaker is telling the truth.

Just as a thought-experiment and without intending any direct parallels (so you can put a sock in that tired lecture script about overheated comparisons): some sixty years ago, Germany falsely accused Poland of some unprovoked aggressive gesture or other, and then in "self-defense" proceeded to invade and devastate the place. It would have been quite easy for a "neutral" commentator to announce that each party had made accusations and aggressive gestures against the other and that now they were fighting and that various parties were speaking very angrily as a result. Such a commentator would not have been even-handed, or disinterested, or any of those other things that on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-handers think they are. Such a commentator would have been a coward refusing to make the obvious moral judgments, period.

Sorry if I seem upset about the state of things this morning. It happens I took the weekend off from the twenty-first century, and re-entry is always a bit of a shock.

I did, however, find something in the Keillor article to be cheerful about. It's this:

After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and Internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you.

Besides which: I think people are lately finding it too easy to pretend that if a liberal speaks angrily, then the liberal is no more than an identical mirror image to a right-wing zealot who is also speaking angrily. Lost is the question of which speaker is telling the truth.

What a revelation this thread is turning out to be. So it doesn't matter how wretched the rhetoric of someone on the left gets, because well, He's Telling the Truth, and heck, logic and good sense just aren't things we can afford in these desperate times?

How disappointing this all is.

I hardly think there's anything unusual about suggesting that speakers should be judged on honesty as well as style. Judge honesty differently than I do if you like, but at least pay attention to the category.

P.S. No, I don't know how you put a sock in a lecture script but if I could draw I'd provide a sketch to lighten the mood around here.

There, does that help?

I hardly think there's anything unusual about suggesting that speakers should be judged on honesty as well as style.

Honesty and style are intimately connected. I would have thought you'd absorbed enough Orwell to see that.

By the same token, then, judging style in isolation doesn't cut it. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, etcetera.

By the same token, then, judging style in isolation doesn't cut it.

'Style' here ought to mean I think a concern for proportion, a willingness to see the other person's point of view (without necessarily accepting it), and a breadth of humility - not a stream of exotic phraseology and clever wordplay. Using the word in that sense I think style compels one towards honesty. And an absence of it pushes one away.

It is true that the excesses of the Right do not pardon the Left for like behavior. On the other hand, the political battle in this country is not going to be a bloodless contest.

The question Alan raised is fair: does the language Keillor uses sink to the level of that used by Coulter? I'm confident it doesn't. Coulter is a hater, a shouter, a destroyer. Keillor stretches credulity by suggesting the flaws common to all humans are greater in conservatives than in liberals.

I like Alan's take on style in the above post - a concern for proportion, a willingness to see the other person's point of view (without necessarily accepting it), and a breadth of humility... I'm not willing to say Keillor's got it by the bushel loads, but next to Coulter he's a giant.

As usual in these arguments we're converging so the hell with the narcissism of small differences. I think it's a good essay and I like Keillor's style. I don't think what he's saying is immoderate given the times, and he's saying it with more bemused good nature than I can usually muster, which as long as we're talking Orwell is a sign of a decent and generously angry soul.

I don't think what he's saying is immoderate given the times

You don't think that saying half the US population is opposed to basic American principles is immoderate ... sorry, I can't top that.

You don't think that saying half the US population is opposed to basic American principles is immoderate ... sorry, I can't top that.

I didn't get that from my reading of the essay.

I didn't see that in the essay either but it's a possibility one considers on reading articles like this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6888837/

I didn't get that from my reading of the essay.

What exactly does "Republicans ... don't feel comfortable in America" mean if it doesn't mean that?

I didn't see that in the essay either but it's a possibility one considers ...(etc)

Sigh.

You have to remember that this was an essay about radio. Keillor was saying that radio is this big sea rich with human experience, some of it strange and disturbing. He's saying Republicans aren't at home with that sea. I think he's being a bit broad, I'd say most of us are afraid of it. Nevertheless, by my reading, he's a long way from saying half the country hates the Constitution.

And don't sigh at me, young man.