Indeed it's hard to imagine how anyone with the slightest grip on reality could believe that any human being, politician or not, could separate who he is from what he does. If our religious moorings, or lack thereof, don't largely define who we are, then nothing does.
But that's the extreme degree to which irrationality has captured the secularist psyche today. The secularist not only advocates extending the separation principle to the point of smothering religious liberty. He demands that religion -- at least the Christian religion -- be privatized (relegated to churches and homes).
In order to assuage the moral qualms of conflicted social conservatives, social liberals have created a whole new system of morality. Social liberals redefine right and wrong: It is right to value your friends and family, and wrong to condemn them for moral failings. According to the social left, in any pitched battle between traditional morality and friendship, those who side with traditional morality are morally wrong.
 And so tolerance has become the new morality. Those who condemn homosexuality are morally wrong. Those who condemn prostitution are morally wrong. Those who condemn abortion are morally wrong. Tolerance is moral -- and traditional morality is simply intolerant. Moore rips the traditional morality crowd as a bunch of conspiratorial bigots: "Your people are up before dawn figuring out which minority group shouldn't be allowed to marry today."
..................................
The new religion of tolerance provides a slippery slope into moral oblivion. All activity must be tolerated, since sympathy for friends and family trumps traditional morality. With tolerance for sin comes acceptance of sin, and with acceptance, promotion. With Roe vs. Wade, Americans grudgingly tolerated abortion.
 With tolerance came acceptance: Those who received abortions were no longer seen as immoral. Instead, they were the moral equals of ordinary mothers. Finally, abortion was promoted as a valuable alternative to pregnancy completion -- and those who condemned abortion were slandered as sinners.
"America is not a religious country, no matter how many Americans say they believe in God. I've been to religious countries and this is not one of them. There is no Sabbath, no fasting or prohibiltions, every day is a feast day. You can buy liquor on Sunday almost anywhere, find pornography in any Marriott or Wal-Mart, and say any ugly, profane thing on the radio or anywhere -- we're fat and sloppy and disciplined as a battalion of cats, an impulsive, dreamy people walking around eating ice cream cones and eyeballing girls' sweaters and dreaming of a big hit on the lottery. If God is looking for a nation to carry out His will on Earth, it isn't this one."
"And it wasn't the leftist professors who led us into the sins of the flesh: it was capitalist entrpreneurs. If the Pharisees really wanted to make this a God-fearing nation, they'd be taking up their cudgels against fellow Republicans."
Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat
[Edited 2 times. Most recently by on Sep 8, 2004 at 07:29pm.]
True to the hypocrisy that often marks even logical liberals’ thinking, Keillor claims this book lays out "the politics of kindness." Does all irony escape this man? Is he finally one of T.S. Eliot’s "hollow men," hopelessly "between idea and reality?"
He tags Republicans as "hairy-backed swamp developers, corporate shills, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads. . ."
Hard-ass Keillor goes on: ". . .tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers" and (gulp!) "nihilists in golf pants." Egad! All this juvenile hyperbole on page 14 of a 256-page screech job his Prairie Home Companion (PHC) website calls "a love letter to liberalism." Come again?
"He's a has-been that's trying to find something else to make a career out of."
I hear that, too. Mainly from other radio guys, Hewitt and Lileks sniffed about him one afternoon. A dinosaur of old media, as in print and broadcast. Not pioneers like us and our blogging cohorts. We're on the Internet! We don't need an editor or oversight. We say what we want, when we want.
Yet a putrid, ugly religion rears up in his polemical diatribes. Republicans, he says, are "criminal" and worse, "evil, deeply evil." With malice toward all "Rs" (and a spot in Hades for libertarians, too), Keillor says, "They do not do what Jesus called us here to do." Oh, really? "Full of passionate intensity," as Yeats put it, Keillor excoriates all who disagree with his God-awful blend of politics and religion.
"Republicans might be heathens out to destroy all we [sic] hold dear," he told The Guardian (London) in 1999, "but that doesn’t mean we take them seriously. Or be bitter because they are swine." Infidels? Pigs? Reads more like a Fatwa from a witless radical fundamentalist Islamic cleric, than ruminations of a revered American humorist.
Hard-ass Keillor goes on: ". . .tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers" and (gulp!) "nihilists in golf pants." Egad! All this juvenile hyperbole on page 14 of a 256-page
Gets you into the story early. Maybe the man who wrote the review for "intellectual conservative" is a golfer who didnt' like the reference.
It's the truth though...look around once in awhile.
I swear, Bill Cosby tells blacks to trying talking more "white" and you claim it's some great message....but Keillor outs the great white way for how it is and you just won't stand for it.
"If you've bought into the usual talk radio screed against liberals, prepare for some serious cognitive dissonance when you read this book. You have been programmed to believe that liberals are treasonous, immoral, elitist spendthrifts hell-bent on stripping America of its military power and you of your right to worship as you please.
"In 'Homegrown Democrat,' Keillor describes how his liberal values were instilled by hardworking, modest, kindly Midwestern Christian folk as American as apple pie, who believed in helping one another because that's just what decent people do.
"Try to hold these conflicting ideas in your mind at least long enough to ponder the possibility that the stereotypes you've learned from Limbaughian/Coulterian right-wing media are, perhaps, maybe, conceivably not quite accurate and that Keillor's expression of liberalism might possibly, by some remote chance more closely reflect what's in the hearts and minds of all the other liberals you love to hate. "
Mr. Keillor praises the Democrats for Medicare, welfare and food stamps. Then, as those programs bankrupt the country he blames the Republicans for the enormous deficits.
He blames the Republicans for getting us into World War II, and the two Gulf Wars. He doesn't bother the mention that Woodrow Wilson plunged us into World War I; Truman the Korean War; or that LBJ was responsible for our involvement in the Vietnam disaster.
He makes the accusations that all racists are Republicans; and says that only Democrats fight for equal rights. He seems to forget the likes of Gov. George Wallace of Georgia who declared in his inaugural speech "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever".
He paints New York, that great bastion of Democratic politics, as a glowing haven. Yet he doesn't point out all the landlords that have abandoned buildings or gone bankrupt because HUD and rent control laws will not allow them to be run profitably. He doesn't point out that the city is a financial disaster.
He tells us how the Republicans in Texas execute prisoners, painting a picture that it is done with gleeful abandon. In fact, this is done after many court challenges have been fought; proving that the individual is so guilty of such heinous crimes that society is better served by their death. Yet as a good Democrat, he would support that in any of our fifty states thousands of innocent babies lose their lives every year. There is no court challenge. No demonstrations (they aren't permitted by law). A woman simply decides that a baby would be inconvenient to her lifestyle and another life is snuffed out. Their only crime is that they have not yet been born.
I am not hard-hearted or mean. I am a Christian and proud of it. If you are in my town and call the ambulance, it is likely that the EMT will be my wife or one of my two sons. The ambulance might not get there in four minutes, but often their dinner gets cold while they volunteer to help someone they don't even know, for no pay and usually little thanks. I am currently taking the EMT course myself. We tend children at no cost so a mom can go away to a school required for her job; or a single dad to work. I take the working parts of broken PC's and rebuild them into working machines, then give them away to people who couldn't otherwise afford them. We are active in our church. I help any one that I can in any way I can. But nothing is free. The only way you can give the money to someone else is to take it from me, and I have a family to feed and educate. Since I am employed, I must actually pay for that food and education. I feel that if I earn the money, I should have the option to decide who and how I use it to help others.
Mr. Keillor - leave politics alone. Your presumptions, logic and conclusions are faulty. Stay where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Rick wrote: "Why don't you read the book before reach all these conclusions?"
Why should he? You don't. You have said that you wouldn't read certain books but you sure have made some comments. The most recent that I remember was on the book God and Ronald Reagan, you wouldn't read it because you already know the "truth."
Demon says that I have no morals. That is damn convincing. You almost had me fooled there Demon.
you also have poor taste in baseball teams
How do you know what beaseball teams I like? The photo is just a photo. I am not a Brewers fan.
Good, but I'm still willing to bet you have poor taste in sports teams
what do you consider poor taste? The Yankees?
Yankees? lmao
Poor taste indeed
You've just made jethro a Yankees fan.
I don't know that anything can make me a Yankees fan except maybe twenty consecutive losing seasons.
Seriously, who are you a fan of?
I am a baseball fan in general and even enjoy spring training games. But I would have to say I am a Twins fan.
Who the Phillies owned
how do you figure? The Phillies did win the series two games to one but the score of the third game was only 2-1.
busting balls, but the Milton has looked like it turned out well for both teams
Pay no attention to him, jethro. Dumon has been spanked off of every sports board there is.
Of course I have.
Â
Do you even know the trade I am talking about?
Indeed it's hard to imagine how anyone with the slightest grip on reality could believe that any human being, politician or not, could separate who he is from what he does. If our religious moorings, or lack thereof, don't largely define who we are, then nothing does.
But that's the extreme degree to which irrationality has captured the secularist psyche today. The secularist not only advocates extending the separation principle to the point of smothering religious liberty. He demands that religion -- at least the Christian religion -- be privatized (relegated to churches and homes).
 http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/dl20040625.shtml
Does the Shroud of Turin confirm the Passion of Christ? http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Crespo20040629.shtml
rotflmao
so gullible, jethro
I just posted an article. But only a person that believes they know it all can make such an assertion. Arrogance, that describes you to a T, Demon.
Shroud of Turin, that should be the new lucky charm marshmellow
no one cares what you think, or more precisely, don't think, Demon.
You do, or else you wouldn't respond
I am trying to entertain myself. You are giving much assistance. Try harder.
Luke 17:
3 Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents,
forgive him;
"screw religion"
-Damon Salandria
you have sinned, Demon, change you ways or suffer the consequences.
-jethro bodine
There are no consequences.
you'll be unpleasantly surprised.
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Liberal Quakers (79%)
3. Secular Humanism (78%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (77%)
5. Theravada Buddhism (70%)
6. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (61%)
7. Neo-Pagan (55%)
8. Nontheist (55%)
9. New Thought (52%)
10. Taoism (50%)
11. Mahayana Buddhism (49%)
12. Bahá'àFaith (48%)
13. New Age (47%)
14. Scientology (46%)
15. Hinduism (45%)
16. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (42%)
17. Reform Judaism (38%)
18. Sikhism (36%)
19. Orthodox Quaker (34%)
20. Jainism (32%)
21. Jehovah's Witness (32%)
22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (30%)
23. Seventh Day Adventist (16%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (14%)
25. Islam (14%)
26. Orthodox Judaism (14%)
27. Roman Catholic (14%)
In order to assuage the moral qualms of conflicted social conservatives, social liberals have created a whole new system of morality. Social liberals redefine right and wrong: It is right to value your friends and family, and wrong to condemn them for moral failings. According to the social left, in any pitched battle between traditional morality and friendship, those who side with traditional morality are morally wrong.
 And so tolerance has become the new morality. Those who condemn homosexuality are morally wrong. Those who condemn prostitution are morally wrong. Those who condemn abortion are morally wrong. Tolerance is moral -- and traditional morality is simply intolerant. Moore rips the traditional morality crowd as a bunch of conspiratorial bigots: "Your people are up before dawn figuring out which minority group shouldn't be allowed to marry today."
..................................
The new religion of tolerance provides a slippery slope into moral oblivion. All activity must be tolerated, since sympathy for friends and family trumps traditional morality. With tolerance for sin comes acceptance of sin, and with acceptance, promotion. With Roe vs. Wade, Americans grudgingly tolerated abortion.
 With tolerance came acceptance: Those who received abortions were no longer seen as immoral. Instead, they were the moral equals of ordinary mothers. Finally, abortion was promoted as a valuable alternative to pregnancy completion -- and those who condemned abortion were slandered as sinners.
 http://www.townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/bs20040901.shtml
[Edited by on Sep 1, 2004 at 09:32am.]
"America is not a religious country, no matter how many Americans say they believe in God. I've been to religious countries and this is not one of them. There is no Sabbath, no fasting or prohibiltions, every day is a feast day. You can buy liquor on Sunday almost anywhere, find pornography in any Marriott or Wal-Mart, and say any ugly, profane thing on the radio or anywhere -- we're fat and sloppy and disciplined as a battalion of cats, an impulsive, dreamy people walking around eating ice cream cones and eyeballing girls' sweaters and dreaming of a big hit on the lottery. If God is looking for a nation to carry out His will on Earth, it isn't this one."
Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat
[Edited by on Sep 8, 2004 at 07:14pm.]
Garrison Keillor, St Paul Rube.
But he sure knows where to get the liquor & the porn!
Yeehaw!
[Edited 2 times. Most recently by on Sep 8, 2004 at 07:17pm.]
"But he sure knows where to get the liquor & the porn!"
Like he said, it's not much of a challenge.
That's bullshit, Rick.
He's a pompous ass.
He's a has-been that's trying to find something else to make a career out of.
You Lefty's just eat up his recent slop.
[Edited by on Sep 8, 2004 at 07:22pm.]
"He's a pompous ass."
Be that as it may:
"And it wasn't the leftist professors who led us into the sins of the flesh: it was capitalist entrpreneurs. If the Pharisees really wanted to make this a God-fearing nation, they'd be taking up their cudgels against fellow Republicans."
Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat
[Edited 2 times. Most recently by on Sep 8, 2004 at 07:29pm.]
Homegrown Democrat?
Hate letter from the left is more like it.
True to the hypocrisy that often marks even logical liberals’ thinking, Keillor claims this book lays out "the politics of kindness." Does all irony escape this man? Is he finally one of T.S. Eliot’s "hollow men," hopelessly "between idea and reality?"
He tags Republicans as "hairy-backed swamp developers, corporate shills, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads. . ."
Hard-ass Keillor goes on: ". . .tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers" and (gulp!) "nihilists in golf pants." Egad! All this juvenile hyperbole on page 14 of a 256-page screech job his Prairie Home Companion (PHC) website calls "a love letter to liberalism." Come again?
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3671.html
[Edited 2 times. Most recently by on Sep 8, 2004 at 07:34pm.]
"He's a has-been that's trying to find something else to make a career out of."
I hear that, too. Mainly from other radio guys, Hewitt and Lileks sniffed about him one afternoon. A dinosaur of old media, as in print and broadcast. Not pioneers like us and our blogging cohorts. We're on the Internet! We don't need an editor or oversight. We say what we want, when we want.
Pissants.
Yet a putrid, ugly religion rears up in his polemical diatribes. Republicans, he says, are "criminal" and worse, "evil, deeply evil." With malice toward all "Rs" (and a spot in Hades for libertarians, too), Keillor says, "They do not do what Jesus called us here to do." Oh, really? "Full of passionate intensity," as Yeats put it, Keillor excoriates all who disagree with his God-awful blend of politics and religion.
"Republicans might be heathens out to destroy all we [sic] hold dear," he told The Guardian (London) in 1999, "but that doesn’t mean we take them seriously. Or be bitter because they are swine." Infidels? Pigs? Reads more like a Fatwa from a witless radical fundamentalist Islamic cleric, than ruminations of a revered American humorist.
"hairy-backed swamp developers, corporate shills, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads. . ."'
Now THAT'S colorful.
Hard-ass Keillor goes on: ". . .tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers" and (gulp!) "nihilists in golf pants." Egad! All this juvenile hyperbole on page 14 of a 256-page
Gets you into the story early. Maybe the man who wrote the review for "intellectual conservative" is a golfer who didnt' like the reference.
[Edited by on Sep 8, 2004 at 07:45pm.]
It's sad that you think so much of such a hateful person.
Goodnight Rick.
It's the truth though...look around once in awhile.
I swear, Bill Cosby tells blacks to trying talking more "white" and you claim it's some great message....but Keillor outs the great white way for how it is and you just won't stand for it.
[Edited by molegrass on Sep 8, 2004 at 08:45pm.]
What Keillor is saying may have a smudge of truth to it, but full of hate, bigotry and outright lies.
What Cosby was saying has some truth to it, but there was no hate, no bigotry or lies.
Everyone has suddenly become a bigot to you. You throw that term around all the time.
Who's he bigoted against?
Why don't you read the book before reach all these conclusions?
[Edited by on Sep 9, 2004 at 05:55am.]
A review on Amazon
"If you've bought into the usual talk radio screed against liberals, prepare for some serious cognitive dissonance when you read this book. You have been programmed to believe that liberals are treasonous, immoral, elitist spendthrifts hell-bent on stripping America of its military power and you of your right to worship as you please.
"In 'Homegrown Democrat,' Keillor describes how his liberal values were instilled by hardworking, modest, kindly Midwestern Christian folk as American as apple pie, who believed in helping one another because that's just what decent people do.
"Try to hold these conflicting ideas in your mind at least long enough to ponder the possibility that the stereotypes you've learned from Limbaughian/Coulterian right-wing media are, perhaps, maybe, conceivably not quite accurate and that Keillor's expression of liberalism might possibly, by some remote chance more closely reflect what's in the hearts and minds of all the other liberals you love to hate. "
Mr. Keillor praises the Democrats for Medicare, welfare and food stamps. Then, as those programs bankrupt the country he blames the Republicans for the enormous deficits.
He blames the Republicans for getting us into World War II, and the two Gulf Wars. He doesn't bother the mention that Woodrow Wilson plunged us into World War I; Truman the Korean War; or that LBJ was responsible for our involvement in the Vietnam disaster.
He makes the accusations that all racists are Republicans; and says that only Democrats fight for equal rights. He seems to forget the likes of Gov. George Wallace of Georgia who declared in his inaugural speech "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever".
He paints New York, that great bastion of Democratic politics, as a glowing haven. Yet he doesn't point out all the landlords that have abandoned buildings or gone bankrupt because HUD and rent control laws will not allow them to be run profitably. He doesn't point out that the city is a financial disaster.
He tells us how the Republicans in Texas execute prisoners, painting a picture that it is done with gleeful abandon. In fact, this is done after many court challenges have been fought; proving that the individual is so guilty of such heinous crimes that society is better served by their death. Yet as a good Democrat, he would support that in any of our fifty states thousands of innocent babies lose their lives every year. There is no court challenge. No demonstrations (they aren't permitted by law). A woman simply decides that a baby would be inconvenient to her lifestyle and another life is snuffed out. Their only crime is that they have not yet been born.
I am not hard-hearted or mean. I am a Christian and proud of it. If you are in my town and call the ambulance, it is likely that the EMT will be my wife or one of my two sons. The ambulance might not get there in four minutes, but often their dinner gets cold while they volunteer to help someone they don't even know, for no pay and usually little thanks. I am currently taking the EMT course myself. We tend children at no cost so a mom can go away to a school required for her job; or a single dad to work. I take the working parts of broken PC's and rebuild them into working machines, then give them away to people who couldn't otherwise afford them. We are active in our church. I help any one that I can in any way I can. But nothing is free. The only way you can give the money to someone else is to take it from me, and I have a family to feed and educate. Since I am employed, I must actually pay for that food and education. I feel that if I earn the money, I should have the option to decide who and how I use it to help others.
Mr. Keillor - leave politics alone. Your presumptions, logic and conclusions are faulty. Stay where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Who's he bigoted against?
Anyone that isn't him. You're time will come too.
Why don't you read the book before reach all these conclusions?
I've read enough from you.
Rick wrote: "Why don't you read the book before reach all these conclusions?"
Why should he? You don't. You have said that you wouldn't read certain books but you sure have made some comments. The most recent that I remember was on the book God and Ronald Reagan, you wouldn't read it because you already know the "truth."
[Edited by on Sep 9, 2004 at 10:36am.]
I'll withdraw the request to JT for the sole reason that I would rather have uncomfortable dental work than read "God and Reagan."
I'll withdraw the request to JT for the sole reason that I would rather have uncomfortable dental work than read "God and Reagan."