Vermont's new administration and Garrison Keillor

Gov-Elect, Peter Shumlin, is continuing his mission of building his administration.  So far, his picks are being met with praise.  He has chosen Lawrence Miller to head up the Commerce Agency.  Miller is the founder of Otter Creek Beer.  This man knows what it takes to create and market a product as well as how to create jobs.  He's very familiar with the State's permitting process and stated on VPR just now that the process is as onerous as many make it out to be.  It just needs to be more predictable.

People want to come to Vermont, because of what Vermont stands for and what it is about.  It's a state that was created by independents; people who grew tired of religious fanatics and simply wanted to live life in peace.  Obviously, they didn't care how tough their life would be or else they would have moved south instead of north.

I had the occassion to see Garrison Keillor on Monday evening at the Paramount Theater in Rutland, Vt.  If you've never been to a show there; go.  It's a wonderful, restored old Vermont theater, which is gaining in popularity every day.

Keillor was outstanding.  There are few people on this planet who can sit on a bar stool and tell a single, convoluted story for two hours and hold a pack house in the palm of his hand.  You could hear a fly fart in the balcony the place was so quiet.

It was a Christmas show, which began with Keillor singing a Carol about an atheist who had been forced to go to church every year at Christmas.  After all this time the atheist was opining that maybe it would be a good thing if there was a god so that all that time spent in church didn't go to waste.

I have written my next column on the man who has hosted "A Prarie Home Companion" for three decades.  Once it's released in the Bennington Banner I'll post it here.  In the meantime, here is a column that I wrote some time ago.  Enjoy...

Priorities

There are more than a few things that I find more than a little annoying these days.  First, we have yet another person who says that he’s pastor; a man of the cloth, who is allegedly involved in a sex scandal.

Pastor Eddie L. Long of Lithonia, Georgia, is a man who founded church and built it up into an empire.  He’s an archconservative who condemns homosexuality and calls for a ban on same-sex marriage. His church holds seminars promising to “cure” homosexuality. 

He’s more than welcome to his beliefs, but now we learn that he coerced some of the younger members of his flock into having homosexual relations with him.  This is another example of people of power and influence who pretend to be holier than thou proving to be otherwise.  I thought that we had had enough of this with some Catholic priests going down this road. 

Pastor Long now joins the ranks of former Congressman Mark Foley and former US Senator, Larry Craig; two men who also decried homosexuality while simultaneously being a closet homosexual.  What is it with these men who speak out so stridently against homosexuality only to be the person that they rail against?

I was born to family that believed what other people did was their business.  My parents may, or may not, have approved of homosexuality in their day, but whatever they believed they kept to themselves.  They were pretty tolerant of others, well, unless you messed with their property stakes.

What galls most of us is that folks like Pastor Long tend to be so darned sanctimonious.  Do we really need to be preached to on sexual orientation by the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and now Mr. Long; especially when some of those doing the preaching are latent homosexuals?

The world would be a much better place if these folks would simply worry about their own lives and let others live theirs.

I’m not sure if this bothers me as much as getting ripped off by people that we’ve spent a trillion dollars trying to help.  I’m talking about our friends in Iraq who we decided needed liberating whether they wanted it or not.

You and I recently paid for a shipment of laptop computers to go to school children in Iraq.  Of the over 8,000 computers that we bought only a few ended up in the hands of kids.  The rest were stolen by a corrupt regime.

According to a story in the New York Times: “The computers — 8,080 in all, worth $1.8 million — were bought for schoolchildren in Babil, modern-day Babylon, a gift of the American taxpayers. Only they became mired for months in customs at the port, Umm Qasr, stalled by bureaucracy or venality, or some combination of the two. And then they were gone.   Corruption is so rampant here — and American reconstruction efforts so replete with their own mismanagement — that the fate of the computers could have ended as an anecdote in a familiar, if disturbing trend. Iraq, after all, ranks above only Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Somalia on Transparency International’s annual corruption index.”

This disturbing news reminded me of L. Paul Bremer’s colossal bilking of the American taxpayer.  You may recall in January of 2005 we learned that this upstanding citizen who was in charge of overseeing the reconstruction of Iraq lost $9 BILLION.  And what were the tough penalties for losing $9 billion?  He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Where was the outrage over wasteful government spending when all this nonsense was going on?  I don’t recall a Tea Party movement going ballistic over a genuine and serious waste of money.  $9 billion would go a long ways towards helping out the average American, but there was hardly a peep when this went down.

To be sure, there is plenty to be angry about in the world today and we are now seeing some citizens becoming animated about life in America.  But I wonder if they aren’t angry at the wrong people.  Should we be madder at those who created a health care bill that will now guarantee children cannot be dropped by insurance companies, because they have a previous illness?  Or should we be madder at those who lose $9 billion and get medals they don’t deserve?

Maybe instead of being persuaded and manipulated by people who preach to us about morality we should just strive to be the best person that we can be and let the other guy try to do the same.  If a person living in either northern Vermont or next door to me is gay I don’t think that impacts my life.  If the man condemning homosexuality, while taking your money, turns out be gay than you were a fool and he a hypocrite.

If a government we support steals 8,000 computers meant for children then we should stop supporting that government.  There are kids right here in America that could put those machines to good use.  We really need to get our priorities straight, don’t you think?

Bob Stannard 9-26-2010