Pass the Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving. Now back to the unyielding demands of the news cycle.

[You see the commitment we have for you, dear readers, here at Fraters? Other sites are taking the weekend off to spend well earned time with their loved ones and thus abandoning their responsibilities of sorting and filtering the news for your review. Other sites are using up thousands of words and precious minutes of your Internet reading time in waxing philosophic about their many blessings and getting all warm and grateful about their lives. And that's fine, I'm truly glad for them. But we here at Fraters Libertas choose to break away from the warm glow of familial bliss to continue digging up the latest examples of Al Gore's ineptitude and Garrison Keillor's verbal foibles.

Trust me, I could take the easy way out. My lovely wife Suzanne's parents flew in all the way from Marin County to spend the day with us here in St. Paul. Per usual, her two brothers and their families are here too. Throw in my parents and two siblings, uncles, aunts, three sets of cousins, my law partner, my publicist and all their respective kids and nannies. Mix in a house full of neighbors, friends and the Elder (who has agreed to tend bar and clean up after the party) and our little Victorian manse in Crocus Hill is almost at capacity for love and good times. We've finished the meal, I gave my traditional toast/poignant recap of the emotional state of our lives, the applause and hugging have about wrapped up, and now the urbane conversation over cocktails begins (and won't end until the wee small ones tomorrow). And where am I at this moment? Back in my den and back on the blogging beat. But I better get to the point here, as Suzanne has just entered the room, with a freshly poured Bushmills rocks for me, and she's very forcefully implying we need a little "face time" before we have to return to our hosting responsibilities.)

So anyway, did you happen to catch Garrison Keillor on CNN earlier this week? He was on live with Aaron Brown (another Minnesota native) and I haven't seen so many softballs thrown at a celebrity newsmaker since Louie Anderson was spied doing time in the dunk tank at the Washington County Fair back in 1987 (I think, and hope, that was for charity). Here's the relevant exchange regarding Keillor's comments about Norm Coleman and as you read this, think of how the tone is just slightly more cordial and deferential than what someone like Rush Limbaugh faces whenever he shows up on the Today Show or some other such mainstream TV outlet:

BROWN: You want to talk about this political flap you created?

KEILLOR: Well, no, but I certainly can.

BROWN: You wrote -- I would describe it as an angry column about the senator-elect from Minnesota, Norm Coleman. You basically called him a fraud.

KEILLOR: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) angry diatribe.

BROWN: Called him a fraud.

KEILLOR: A screed. It's very seldom that one gets to write out of pure anger, especially at my age. You feel it so seldom. So when you do, it seems to me you ought to take advantage of it.

BROWN: And you did. You unloaded on the guy.

KEILLOR: I wrote a piece for Salon.com. They asked me to write it. And the amazing thing about it to me is the power of the Internet and all of those people who just lift this piece of passionate writing and they send it off to all of their friends, and they send it off.

We have no idea how far this gets around the country, but this thing was bouncing back to me within days from people I barely know. I really was astonished. We don't have any measurement for that, do we?

BROWN: Do you think -- do you think the column -- the piece was a bit harsh. You talked about his family in the piece. Do you think it was a bit...

KEILLOR: It was an angry diatribe against a very beautifully packaged politician. And one could have written in different ways but I come from St. Paul. We're a small town, we know people. And so that's how I wrote it.

BROWN: Do you think you'll do the radio program forever or do you see a time when you'll step away from it?

KEILLOR: I think I'll do it for another five years. It's a lot of fun. It's a great deal. It's you know, I get to play a cowboy. I get to play a private eye. I get to smoke a cigar on the radio. I don't smoke a cigar.

BROWN: Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming in.

KEILLOR: Good to see you.

BROWN: Please come back.

KEILLOR: Thanks.

BROWN: Garrison Keillor. We'll be right back after a short break.