Garrison Keillor: the new-look Denver Post's idea of a flaming lefty
Garrison Keillor.
An editor's note by editorial-page editor Dan Haley, featured in the op-ed section of today's Denver Post print edition, reads: "Good news from the right, and left. KOA radio talk show host and former Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Rosen will begin writing his column for The Denver Post Friday. And Garrison Keillor, the popular folk humorist and national radio personality, will write for Saturday's paper."
Clearly, Haley is positioning these additions as an example of balance -- but are they? Rosen certainly stands for red-meat conservatism, even as he presents a very contemporary example of what can happen to investors in today's kill-or-be-killed marketplace; read about the hit recently taken by his portfolio in the February 9 blog "KOA's Mike Rosen Tackles Critics' Questions About His Fiscal Meltdown." But is Keillor, the folksy bard of Lake Woebegone on National Public Radio, really a progressive firebrand? His column today is a warm remembrance of his late brother. His February 25 offering focuses on cold winters. On February 18, he ruminated about obituaries. What a radical!
Truth is, the Post's op-ed pages, long attacked by conservatives as a bastion of pinheaded progressivism, have been trending rightward for a while now -- and the changes made since the Rocky folded last week are pushing it even further in that direction.
The aforementioned Haley is a proud conservative thinker, while the Post's most prominent opinion peddler, former metro columnist David Harsanyi, typically espouses libertarian viewpoints that skew rightward. In recent days, this pair has been joined by former Rocky editorial-page editor Vince Carroll, whose right-wing credentials are absolutely unquestioned. Granted, he wrote a December column praising Congressman Jared Polis. But today, he's back to bashing the Boulder Dem, joining fellow Rocky expat Mike Littwin and even cartoonist Mike Keefe, whose illustration of Polis dancing on the Rocky's grave bears a strange resemblance to Dean Singleton. Hmmmm.
Rosen fits in perfectly with these scribes -- and Keillor's nostalgic musings hardly constitute a view from the other ideological side. At this point, those who complain about the Post's left-leaning editorial policy are essentially signaling that they haven't read the paper in a while.
Your mangling of the correct spelling of Lake Wobegon betrays your ignorance of Mr. Keillor's body of work. His column is available on Salon (which is where I read it), and he has quite the ability to take that "folksy" wit and turn it into quite the funny analysis of the political scene, as evidenced here.
True, he's not the kind of liberal columnist that focuses strictly on politics and is judged strictly on the ability to quickly foam at the mouth in 750 words or less. If you need any further evidence, check out the first paragraph of his book Homegrown Democrat:
Garrison Keillor is am American treasure, and I'm glad that the Post picked him up. Living in Grand Junction, I'm often drawn to remember one of his descriptions of Lake Wobegon; "the little town that time forgot, and the decades cannot improve".
With the demise of the Rocky, Westword is poised to assume the position of metro Denver's leading tabloid publication. Don't mess it up by not doing your homework and pretending you know something about something. That strategy will result in reducing your paper into just another alternative weekly, with a bunch of words sandwiched between the concert and outcall massage ads.
Posted On: Wednesday, Mar. 4 2009 @ 4:02PM