I Wish I'd Said That #2: From Nixon to Newt in one scary generation

Here's the finest and funniest paragraph I've read this political season, by the inimitable Garrison Keillor. In an online essay entitled, "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore," published on the In These Times Web site, Keillor makes this observation about the current state of the Republican Party, wondering how the decent, pragmatic party of Dwight Eisenhower became the paranoid, hostile party of Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.