GARRISON KEILLOR LOOKS BEHIND JOHN MCCAIN’S DISPARAGEMENT OF BARACK OBAMA’S AUTHENTICITY, BRILLIANCE, JUDGMENT AND EXPERIENCE
I love Garrison Keillor’s columns that appear in newspapers across the country. He is one of the “good ole’ country boys” from Minnesota who not only writes a column, but has had a very successful radio program for years entitled the Prairie Home Companion.
Recently, he wrote a column entitled “The Old Guy’s technical foul makes you LOL.” Often, when reading a Keillor piece you have to read down a couple of paragraphs or more before you get his point.
In this case, he writes:
An American guy is capable of many costumes…but as you enter your golden years, your interest in masquerade naturally diminishes, and so it’s interesting to see America’s Oldest Presidential Candidate out on the hustings transforming himself into a yahoo and a cracker. Whatever consultant told him to do this is being paid way too much.
The political exploitation of wounded American soldiers by Sen. John McCain and his eagerness to introduce race in the race was yahoo behavior, but never mind…
And it’s an amazing country where an Arizona multi-millionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got “scholarshipped” into Harvard Law School and was made president of the Law Review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.
Good luck with that, sir…”
Keillor has a brilliant talent of clarifying ideas and presenting them in a humorous and enlightened style, Needless to say, McCain has been running blatant lies about Obama claiming that he has reached celebrity status, but lacks the talent to run the country, claiming that Obama is an elitist although he came from a single parent home and was reared by his grandparents who were average, everyday Americans, claiming that his oratorical skills supplants his lack of experience for the presidency and on and on and on.
It is obvious that McCain wants to be president more than he wants to be honest and trustworthy.
Here’s a guy who marries a woman who is multi-millionaire heiress to a beer distributors fortune in Arizona and calls Obama elitist.
Here’s a man whose father and grandfather, both admirals in the Navy, opened the door to Annapolis, with little regard for his academic ability or seaworthiness and consequently finished fifth from the bottom of his class.
Here’s a man who has been in the Senate for 26 years and is just now becoming concerned about this country’s reliance on foreign oil and has voted against every bill that would provide tax credits to companies who would do the hard work necessary to give us alternative fuels.
Here’s a guy who voted against Bush tax cuts because they gave too much to the rich and too little to the low and middle income families, and now because he needs the support of the ultra conservative wing of the Republican Party who live and die on tax cuts, flip flops like a diving porpoise and now favors the very tax cuts he once denounced.
Here’s a naval office who thinks because he was a Navy pilot and a prisoner of war that he is an expert on foreign policy and counter-terrorism when in fact, he is a right-wing hawk who is prone to war more than peace.
Here is a man who has benefited for decades from the opulent insurance policy for Senators and other government officials, but continues to vote against healthcare for all Americans.
Here is a Senator who voted to give Bush all of the leeway he sought to limit the civil rights of American citizens under the guise of national security.
This man has neither the education, the judgment, the fluency, the recall, nor the energy to run the most powerful office in the world, and yet he lacks the respect and the capacity to appreciate the talents of his opponent who will potentially become the most brilliant president to occupy the oval office since Thomas Jefferson.
The legend has it that while John F Kennedy was entertaining several Nobel Prize winners at a luncheon in the White House he said that never had so much brainpower gathered at one time in the White House dinning room since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
Obama is that bright and if McCain understood the brilliance, the excellence of his opponent’s judgment and his uncanny ability to bring hostile factions together to solve problems and produce answers to previously insoluble problems that have harmed our nation’s effectiveness and supremacy, he probably would stop running a smear campaign and turn to the kind of civil campaign he promised from the beginning.
11:43:25 AM 
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