Garrison Keillor

Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation tweeted about this whopper of a claim from NPR personality Garrison Keillor, speaking on his daily podcast/broadcast “Writer’s Almanac” on Monday. He said, “According to the Earth Day Network, Earth Day is celebrated – observed in some form by a billion people every year.”

How exactly do these activists claim that wild number? Keillor seems to be exaggerating a little on the “every year” part. The Environment News Service began a report: “What started in 1970 as a teach-in about the environment has expanded year by year until Earth Day actions this year include more than one billion people in some 192 countries.”

On the popular radio show A Prairie Home Companion this weekend, NPR star Garrison Keillor sang a different version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." It had a slightly different melody, and mocked Newt Gingrich, without naming him. Keillor sang: "Don’t think a sense of style conceals your escapades / Don’t vote to impeach Bill Clinton while shacking up with Congressional aides." Gingrich was cheating on his second wife (with his eventual third wife) at that time in 1998.

Keillor also sang that Santa is watching for who is "beating up on" gays or minorities. There's nothing wrong with opposing physical violence or mean-spirited bullying -- but with NPR, you'd have to suspect Keillor is implying a broader argument about conservative arguments against gay marriage or "affirmative action." Keillor sang:

Ben Smith at Politico reports that in her new book, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann goes out of her way to praise Garrison Keillor, the arrogant liberal host of A Prairie Home Companion on NPR. This is the guy that wrote for Time magazine that "The Republicans are going to be the Party That Canceled the Clean Air Act and Took Hot Lunches from Children, the Orphanage Party of Large White Men Who Feel Uneasy Around Gals."

How would Bachmann process that one? She oozed in the book: “His politics are very different from mine, but I love his gentle, knowing humor. Keillor understands Minnesota, from Lutherans to lutefisk, and his ability to squeeze laughs out of serious-minded midwesterners makes him a legend.”

National Public Radio is right to defend itself against charges of Nazism leveled at the radio station by Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who has since apologized for the remark. But NPR decided to make the leap from defending the station to attacking Fox News as uniquely disposed to Nazi comparisons, an absurd claim on its face.

There are commentators on both sides of the political spectrum who routinely prove Godwin right. But being the predictably-liberal news outlet that it is, NPR invoked vague claims by far-left Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (neither his ideological leanings nor the multitude of his most recent baseless Fox accusations are mentioned) to paint FNC as unique in its invocation of Nazism.

Garrison Keillor thinks lousy holiday songs written by Jewish guys trash up America's malls every year.

So wrote the public radio host and satirist in an article at Wednesday's Baltimore Sun called "Nonbelievers, Please Leave Christmas Alone."

Given the rabid anti-Semitism in the following paragraph, one has to wonder how this piece managed to not only got published, but also escape media outrage (h/t InstaPundit via Big Hollywood):

Public-radio host Garrison Keillor isn’t just convinced that NPR saves the lives of outraged right-wingers in heavy traffic. He also believes that socialists are the forces of Christmas, and for conservatives to oppose the nationalization of health care is just like opposing the message of Christmas. His latest anti-conservative screed appeared at The New York Times website:

Christmas is one of the bulwarks of Life As We Know It, and in these parlous times we cling to its classic truth, which is: Rejoice, be not afraid, and show mercy to the poor and outcast, for it was through such people that Jesus came into the world. Dickens' ancient novella, written in a big rush because he was low on cash, is on the silver screen again, and Scrooge is moved by the Spirits to share the wealth with his downtrodden clerk.

Public-radio broadcaster/merchandiser/multi-millionaire Garrison Keillor answered "Ten Questions" for Time magazine, none of them challenging to his liberal pomposity. Only one turned political:

What role do you feel public radio plays in America today? – Cameron Homer, Pocatello, Idaho

Its role is to talk to people who are stuck in traffic. And conservatives become incensed enough listening to public radio that it keeps them awake so they don't drive into a fire hydrant. That's what we do: we save the lives of thousands of right-wingers every year. And they never thank us for it.

Besides being the host of "A Prairie Home Companion," Keillor is also an author, including the book Homegrown Democrat. Notice the conservative-bashing from the book jacket:

In a Chicago Tribune article today that appears to open as an attempt at humor but quickly devolves into nastiness, NPR-dependent radio host and author Garrison Keillor, among other things, attacks social conservatives, blames them and not those who have brought legal actions for years-long fights over keeping religious symbols right where they are, and -- while conveniently forgetting that Republican Mitt Romney gave us the Massachusetts disaster known as CommonwealthCare that current Bay State Democratic governor Deval Patrick considers the model for ObamaCare -- ponders the pros and cons of cutting Republicans "out of the health-care system entirely."

There are few if any indications in the last 2/3 of his column that Keillor was attempting anything resembling humor. If he was, he failed.

Here are some paragraphs from the screed:

I guess out on Lake Blowbegone, patriotism isn't kosher? Keillor just seems, nose in the air, to find all that lowborn patriotism so woefully gauche. At least, one might get that impression by reading the attack penned by Garrison Keillor against the patriotism evinced by the folks who don their red, white and blue, along with their leather jackets and hop on their Hogs to join the long line of motorcycle riders at "Rolling Thunder" on Memorial Day in Washington D.C. This year, Keillor was so put off by the patriotic bikers that he was driven to his keyboard to regale us all with his bad metaphors and surly disposition.

With "The roar of hollow patriotism," Keillor found that he just couldn't stomach the loud patriotism expressed by the Harley riders in D.C. He also seemed to say that if you are a "fat man with a ponytail" you shouldn't be allowed to express that patriotism in a manner you so wish to express it.

NPR personage Garrison Keillor loans his public-radio voice – hailed by liberals at Slate as "a breathy baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers" – to a feature called "The Writer’s Almanac," which usually features a poem and and some literary and historical notes of the day. On Thursday, Keillor recounted how Democrats once regretted demands for an early withdrawal and ended up looking like the party of surrender:

It was on this day in 1864 that Abraham Lincoln was elected to his second term as president of the United States, one of the few elections in world history to be held in the middle of a civil war. Lincoln might have tried to cancel or postpone the election until the war was over, but he said, "If the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

Major National Public Radio moneybags Garrison Keillor is up to his usual rhetorical tricks over at Salon, putting on the sardonic tone like a pair of his red sneakers about George Bush's waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq:  

I suppose that $8 billion is not so much considering that the war will cost $200 billion this year alone, and yet one is curious to know why the G-men can't find out where it went, at a time when the Current Occupant is so very concerned about keeping medical benefits away from undeserving children. Hundreds of millions paid to the gunslingers of Blackwater, but an American family with a seriously ill child has to tap-dance backward through a gantlet of government forms to prove they really, really, really are desperate.

As the old adage says, the little thieves get hung and the big thieves get richer and richer. When it comes to larceny, it pays to be ambitious.