Garrison Great. Again.

If you're like me, you sometimes listen to A Prairie Home Companion and wonder whether Garrison Keillor has maybe lost his mojo just a little bit. The music is still always great, and GK's personality is as likeable as ever. But, after the wonderful political stuff that he had been doing in 2004 and before, he seems to have backed off from his masterful skewering of W.

I read an interview with him a short while back, and he said something about feeling uncomfortable doing political stuff on APHC. His show, his choice. I miss it, though.

However, he's back on Salon.com. His latest piece, "The Little Man", is an absolute must-read.

Here are the first two paragraphs, just for a little taste:

Feb. 8, 2006 | The headline of the AP story was "Bush Urges Confidence in His Leadership" -- which is like "Author Says Memoir Is True" or "FEMA Offers Contingency Plan" -- and I didn't bother to read further. The Old Brush Cutter never got the knack of urging, and whenever he tries, he looks small and petulant, like a cartoon of himself. He photographs well in formal situations, and he is good at keeping a low profile when necessary, which is a key to survival in politics, as in boxing, but when it comes to the hortatory, he gets all hissy and squinty.

As a preacher, he is not in the top 50 percentile, and if his name were J. Ralph Cooter he would be hard put to find work in any of the persuasive professions. But there he is, giving the State of the Union, more or less in charge of the shop, or on a first-name basis with those who are, and so long as he refrains from perjury and tax increases and doesn't wear a dress to the Easter Egg Roll, he will probably slide along OK.

And it gets way better from there.

Frequent readers of this blog have heard me make the pitch for subscribing to Salon before. If you, the current reader, haven't, then I'll say it again: Subscribing to Salon is the best $35 that you will spend for any kind of reading material. Bar none. Just do it.

Thanks to MK for the original link (and for the gift subscription which clued me in three years ago!).