Although still to be found in the “New” section of the Montgomery Library,  this latest G.K. book was first published in the summer of ’04 with the intent of being a swing factor for Democrats in the last presidential election. Obviously, it wasn’t enough.

Keillor risked permanent disenfranchisement of Republican listeners to his weekly “Prairie Home Companion” radio show, but he did, as he says in the book’s closing, “get to speak my piece.” And you are absolved, Garrison, from Dante’s depicted “hottest place in hell reserved for those who in a crisis remain neutral.” Continued “continuance” of Bush administration incompetence and scandal has further swung American perception so that Keillor’s work is perhaps now more attractive to a larger audience.

There’s some G.K. biography--growing up semi-rural, Anoka high school, U of Minn, first school radio work—but all translated into a Midwest Democratic psyche: “Don’t think you’re special.” Keillor uses Lake Woebegone common people attitude—“we’re all connected”—to explain his evolved political status.

And he takes some pretty good shots at Republicans. There’s  the “oily and toxic Tom Delay” the “stone-brained Cheney” the “tragic Powell-—who could’ve been great put deferred to the boss’s  callow son.” All leading, of course, to our “etch-a-sketch president who for 4 years looked as if he were just about to say something smart.”

With “lies popping like toadstools in the forest” and “hypocrisies shinning like cat turds in the moonlight,” Garrison laments “Mark Twain, where art thou?” You’re taking his place, G.K., and according to latest polls, only 38% of Americans should disapprove.