Take Off and Nuke Lake Woebegon from Space; It's the Only Way to Be Sure

I've had a bad opinion of Garrison Keillor for quite a while now, but he'd largely slipped from my notice until today, when he evidently posted this on Facebook and it found its way onto Twitter:

This is basically gibberish.  It is false that 40% of Americans believe that the world is flat; Keillor seems to have pulled that number from his capacious ass.  What he considers "cultural war" issues, and it's interesting that a poetry fan would consider culture to be trivial, are not trivial to most Americans.  Only a minority want to overturn Roe v. Wade, a majority are okay with same-sex marriage, and I don't think a majority want to "criminalize LGBTQ" either.  And those are matters of life and death for many people, even if they don't matter personally to him.

"The economy and tax policy and environment," etc. are not going to become easy issues if the "cultural war" ends tomorrow.  The Republicans would only take it as a sign that they'd won a significant victory and move to destroy everything else.  Since liberals like Keillor have already surrendered to them, they can be sure they'll get everything they want in no time, and they'll be right.  The economy, tax policy, the environment, education, homelessness, etc. are not areas "where we agree" -- who is "we" here?  Maybe he means the rich elites like himself, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, who agree that that the lives of the vast majority of citizens don't matter.  From his conclusion it's clear that Keillor is a Brunch Liberal who thinks that once Trump is out of office, everything will be fine.  It won't.  By the same token, exiling Keillor to a bare rock in the middle of the ocean would be satisfying, but it wouldn't solve all our problems either.  Like Trump, Keillor is just a symptom of a more profound, more pervasive rot.

A Lake Wobegon War on Christmas

Before I forget, someone commented today on Facebook, under a meme mocking the War on Christmas, that she "actually shut Prairie Home Companion off yesterday, because the very first words from the host were, 'It's Christmas, we say Merry Christmas here.' As if 1) Christmas is the origin of these traditions, and 2) none of their listeners would be celebrating the holidays Christmas took its traditions from."

I've long disliked Garrison Keillor (see about halfway through that post), so I was pleased to add another reason for disliking him to my list.  But then I got nervous.  Don't believe everything you see on the Internet, right?  And even without an intention to deceive, people mishear what they hear.  Luckily, thanks to the Internet, it is easy nowadays to check these things.  The show she was referring to is available online, and dang if she wasn't right.  They weren't quite the very first words out of Keillor's mouth, but they came early in his opening monologue, and she didn't take them out of context either.  Perhaps one could argue that he was being ironic, as part of his fake-folksy persona, but I don't think so; listen for yourself and decide.