Garrison Keillor, Salon, October 24, 2007
There is a natural division of labor in politics: The Republicans fuss about the sanctity of marriage and getting God back in the schools and the Democrats about healthcare and the $8 billion that vanished in Iraq, and so far the Republicans are doing a better job. God is in the schools, the same as He is in Nebraska or even in Dallas, and marriage looks to be doing OK, since the White House is not in charge of it. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the Justice Department are investigating fraud in Iraq, one grain of sand at a time, and we are likely to have answers in a decade or two.
I suppose that $8 billion is not so much considering that the war will cost $200 billion this year alone, and yet one is curious to know why the G-men can’t find out where it went, at a time when the Current Occupant is so very concerned about keeping medical benefits away from undeserving children. Hundreds of millions paid to the gunslingers of Blackwater, but an American family with a seriously ill child has to tap-dance backward through a gantlet of government forms to prove they really, really, really are desperate.
As the old adage says, the little thieves get hung and the big thieves get richer and richer. When it comes to larceny, it pays to be ambitious.
If you were looking for a political platform, God and marriage would be a good bet, sort of like promising to make the sun rise. A part-time job with time left over to supervise the moon and the stars. It is so much more satisfying than the dreary business of investigating what happened to those suitcases full of bricks of $100 bills in Iraq during the Bremer years and tracking down the good Republicans who served over there — the young folks with no prior experience in accounting or finance who were put in charge of the stock exchange and the national budget.