Garrison Keillor on politics

A post by Merghers on Halloween as a Republic Holiday (you scare everyone half to death and gobble up as much as you can without concern for the consequences) led me to this lovely column, by the famous Garrison Keillor, who invented or reported Lake Wobegon (where all the children are above average).

If your alderman introduced a resolution in the city council called the Salute To Our Boys In Uniform Resolution, which proclaimed that we support the troops in their mission to light a beacon of freedom in a dark world, etc., and in small print in Section II, Division A, Paragraph 4, Line 122 was a provision giving the alderman's brother-in-law Walt the contract to haul garbage, the honorable gentleman would be denounced as a crook and a dodo. And yet this same dodge has worked beautifully for Republicans in Washington, who have clubbed their hapless opponents over the head with Old Glory and then set up shop and profited mightily, and more power to them. I am in favor of corruption so long as it makes people truly happy. And so long as somebody writes a good confessional memoir like John Dean's "Blind Ambition."

It's nice to see corruption given its true place in the democratic process. Particularly in America, where the right to happiness is guaranteed by the Constitution and Nature.