Garrison Keillor takes on Gitmo

Garrison Keillor comes as close to being the bard of the American heartland as anyone I can think of. He does a weekly hour-long radio show, the whimsically named “Prairie Home Companion”, that is mainly good-natured entertainment that features live performers before a live audience in his home city of Minneapolis/St. Paul… But it also sometimes has a political edge to it.
Today, Keillor has a hard-hitting column in the International Herald Tribune. (Hat-tip to Jane C. there.) Commenting on the significance of the US Senate’s action last week that stripped the age-old right of habeas corpus away from non-citizens detained by the US overseas, Keillor writes:

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea.
Mark their names: Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Imhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.
…Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the Supreme Court will dispose of this piece of garbage.
If, however, the Court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it.
Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

Keillor then recounts a visit he recently made to the President’s “home” church in Dallas, Texas… and the inability of the very comfortable Methodists gathered there to even appreciate the irony with which he was commenting on how comfortable their lives all seemed.
He concluded thus:

The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantánamo, stripped naked, forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise, so why should they worry? It’s only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies. The Christians are doing just fine.
If you can’t trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

I should note that some of my very best friends are in one way or another Methodists. Also, Keillor’s reference there to the Jews and the homosexuals and the gypsies is a Nazi-era reference. It would have been kind of nice if he’d put “the Muslims” into that list, since all the detainees in Gitmo are in fact, as far as I know, Muslims. But I guess he was writing in a figurative way there, and it is certainly very evocative and hard-hitting. I think he made the point.