Some commenters here have questioned the degree to which folks at PW engage in historical analysis of current events. And to be fair, history is not a perfect guide, as events rarely repeat themselves exactly.
However, for a cautionary tale about how an ignorance of history can combine with prejudice to hysterical results, one need look no further than Garrison Keillor:
It’s good for an old liberal like me to read history and recognize that Eisenhower was no dolt and Adlai Stevenson was no giant. And to read about Joe McCarthy and realize that, opportunist and blowhard that he was, he was hardly the embodiment of evil that we liberals cherished as an enemy. We made the people he attacked into heroes but McCarthyism was very small potatoes. Alger Hiss was not the victim of a witch hunt; he was a witch. The big story was taking place in Russia and Eastern Europe, in China, and in Cuba, places where evil ruled with an open hand, but a great many Democrats refused to see it. This refusal was a reaction against anti-communists such as Richard Nixon  if he said the sun rose in the east, then we would look off to the west and maybe build mirrors there so as to be able to argue the point  and this gave the Democratic party a reputation for appeasement that has crippled us ever since.
…and yet, from this, he concludes not that conservatives might have a point when it comes to the threat of Islamist jihadi-style terrorism, or that BDS is warping the worldview of the Left in the same way that Nixon-hatred did, but that Republicans are destroying themselves by defending President Bush. Which he must do, lest he admit to himself that his own severe case of BDS has completely warped his worldview for years. Not that he’s hopeless; he actually managed to be gracious when Pres. Reagan died. So give him a couple of decades and he might figure out that the Current Occupant is not the Antichrist.
(h/t Lileks)
I like Garrison better than all that other PMS on PBS, outside of Click and Clack, who rule.
You, sir, are an optimist.
When I used to deliver pizza as a career I had the fortune of listening to Rush Limbaugh every day and then I’d flip over to NPR. I used to really like NPR. Perhaps I’ve hardened; grown bitter, but I used to look forward to A Prarie Home Campanion. It always felt nostalgic to hear a show being broadcast from a full theater. But gradually Keillor solidified in me the belief that he is a condescending man, and all his warm neighborliness is reserved for Democrats. He speaks fondly of a simpler life, and I think he pines for America at the birth of the New Deal, when Democrats were all that were, or so it seems.
Mr. K is one of the great casualties of BDS of our political generation. Like Syd Barrett, only his acid is Kos. He simply is incapable of consistantly putting a thought together any longer. And even when he has a lucid moment (the article appears to have been one such moment)he still manages to call all woes of the world Bush’s fault.
If Prairie Home Companion was his Piper at the Gates of Dawn, his current columns are some bad BDS flashback stuff, only taken seriously by those with minds twisted by BDS themselves.
Pree-cisely, Your Frogness… Nostalgia for a time and a place that really never was.
I also can’t get around how little he looks like his voice. I hear the voice and think of a sandy-haired lantern-jawed Minnesota Swede with a pipe between his teeth – and then I remember the pictures I’ve seen (too much like Al Franken for me) and the cognitive dissonance takes over.
It only took him forty or fifty years to realize that.
How long do you think it will take with this War, this adversary, and this president?
I would say contrarianism rather than appeasement, but that would have made the logical contortions that follow even more difficult, I guess.
His closing paragraph is quite true, also, it will be nice if he can follow his own advice.
Lileks’s column got quashed by the Star-Trib
My mom and dad (very conservative) used to subject me to the Prairie Home Companion when I was alot younger, long before we were aware of Keilor’s moonbat take on the world in general.
Now when I mention PHC to my mother, she wants to be sick.
I saw that, Dan. Looks like Minneapolis’ finest fish-wrapper and fire-starter wants to waste talent.
What shall we call this ‘business reorganization plan’? Crater Maker? Dirt Dart?
Garrison’s circumlocution comes closer to admitting Bush was right than anything I’ve heard or read from his class of publicly-funded “intelligentsia.”
I think this is the best we can hope for from any self-aware member of the liberal commentariat that is as vested in the “Bush Lied” narrative as Keillor is…so we ought to at least be grateful.
Possibly related: Daniel Schorr was sighted chugging Nyquil behind the wheel of his Lexus this morning while waiting in the Seattle/Bainbridge ferry toll-lane. I’ll bet the poor guy’s got a raging migraine ‘cuz the Dow’s above 13,000, and Sarkozy just won France.
Ah, the sweet nostalgia of seeing alfi in full flow & timmyb failing to point me at the comment where I accused his government of treason. Those were the days..
If you want mid west wit & wisdom without the bile, Bill Bryson is worth a thousand Garrison Keillors.
Believe me, I am not holding my breath.
Well … I’d die, for one thing. And man, the shades of purple I’d turn in the process. Not a pretty sight.
I don’t even think “contrarianism” is the right word for it. “Active support” and “sympathy” are really better. Contrarianism didn’t put that lousy broad on the anti-aircraft gun.
And TRUE Nixon-hatred came long after McCarthy.
But what bothers – I’d say angers, but you really gotta surprise someone to anger them – is that this is really the same formula that liberals use to measure any tension between Western Civilization (and more particularly, America) and any part of the world.
America MADE them do it. They wouldn’t saw off heads, invade Poland, turn Cuba into a giant Alcatraz, become narcoterrorists, eat human livers, slaughter kids at Tiannenman, or spread out the killing fields in America didn’t make them do it.
Similarly, in Keillor’s mind, progressives wouldn’t go nuts if it wasn’t for, let’s just call them anti-anti-anti-Communists.
Though it had its roots in leftist dismay at the Hiss verdict…
bloated with charmingness more than charm
his solemn promise: to never
not ever challenge the most trivial assumption
of Marconi’s unscrapable barnacles
a prostrate man
one of those avuncular fellows
you don’t leave alone with your children
“We made the people he attacked into heroes but McCarthyism was very small potatoes. Alger Hiss was not the victim of a witch hunt; he was a witch. The big story was taking place in Russia and Eastern Europe, in China, and in Cuba, places where evil ruled with an open hand, but a great many Democrats refused to see it. This refusal was a reaction against anti-communists such as Richard Nixon”
Yes, Keillor is still spinning lies, although it is possible that he believes his own BS. The motive was not hatred for Nixon but sympathy for left-wing utopianism and tyrannies that promised to deliver it. But facing up to that fact might cause Keillor’s head to explode.