Thrice-Married NPR Snob Garrison Keillor Mocks Newt Gingrich as a 'Polygamist'

February 6th, 2012 10:52 PM

Hypocrisy knows no bounds on the airwaves of National Public Radio, as their Minnesota-based star Garrison Keillor led off his latest edition of “A Prairie Home Companion” by mocking the GOP frontrunners as “the Mormon running against the polygamist.” This is a rich dig coming from Keillor, since he has been married three times – just as many times as Newt Gingrich.

This was within three minutes of the program starting, just a little partisan liberal boilerplate before the folksy singers get started. Keillor mocked conservatives like Romney and Gingrich for believing "the solution to our current dilemma is to go back to the policies that helped cause that dilemma...deregulation, cutting taxes, starting a new war, if possible."

Everything on NPR seems to tell the Republican to turn off the radio, this show was not produced for him. He's supposed to pay for it, but not suffer through it. The lecture commenced like this:

The Republican primaries go on – great fun – the Mormon running against the polygamist. And, uh –  [Laughter and applause] Very interesting.  Newt Gingrich, Speaker Newt Gingrich. There is nobody like him, nobody, absolutely nobody! He’s just a throwback right straight out of the 19th century. This guy is just unvarnished. He just talks and talks and talks. This guy does not need an airbag in his car. [Laughter] Got a windbag – it’s himself.

Then he shifted into mocking Mormonism alongside Gingrich again, how he unspools kooky lines without any consultants telling him what to say:

The line about Kenyan, anti-colonialist view of the world that he attributed to the President, that just came out of this guy. Or was presented to him, you know,  by an angel in the woods of upstate New York, on a silver tablet, you know, in a language only Newt Gingrich can understand.

The guy who’s got the Vitalis – now, everything that he says is very well-calibrated, It’s like a fine racing engine – it’s jut you know, everything’s been tested, pre-tested, road-tested. Gone before focus groups and so on. Tested with little blue strips of paper, everything that he says. Newt Gingrich – wow! Whoa, it just flows out of him, the guy with the helmet hair. Just a wild, wild man.

They believe in the same things, you know, they believe in the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, the U.S. Constitution, and they believe that the solution to our current dilemma is to go back to the policies that helped cause that dilemma. [Applause] Interesting thing – deregulation, cutting taxes, starting a new war, if possible.

He called the election the “Super Bowl for grown-ups” – that’s a pretty insulting put down of sports fans – and then said the country can survive just about anybody in the White House.

[Hat tip: Wcook3]