fall has fell

I don't want to make a habit of relying on other people's words here, but (and there's always a but isnt' there) Garrison Keillor's piece today at Salon.com begs to be cited (and it's a pay-for-content sit—which I commend as a bargain at $35 a year for the premium membership—so you can't read it unless you join, which I hope you will). Anyway, Mr. Keillor's piece today is...well, it includes the following:

"It's a hard fall for George W. Bush. His career was based on creating low expectations and then meeting them, but Katrina was a blast of reality. The famous headline said, 'Bush: One of the Worst Disasters to Hit the U.S.' and many people took that literally. Poor black people huddled together in the Superdome were seen on national TV, people stretched out asleep between the goal lines, and a 911 operator broke into sobs telling what it was like to talk to little kids in flooded houses and two weeks later the president had become a New Deal liberal and was calling for a major anti-poverty program in the Gulf and hang the expense. The annual deficit is running around $300 billion, but the president says we can afford a few hundred billion in hurricane repair without a tax increase, even if we call it a 'hurricane impact fee.'

"Meanwhile we are pushing a large deception down the road -- the idea that the war in Iraq is to defend us against terrorism -- at enormous expense to our armed services and also to the Treasury, and for Americans who remember the last time a Texas president told us we must 'stay the course,' there is a certain sinking feeling.

"But that's life. It happened to the Romans and the Mayans and the Sumerians and it's happening to us. In our society, as in those, the Grand Poobah gives the orders and the lackeys, minions, henchmen and stooges carry them out, and when the experimental plane with the lead-covered wings crashes, the minions return to His Eminence and lick his boots and he dispatches a yes man to chastise the fall guy, and then the fall guy whips the whipping boy, and then both of them pound on the goat. And construction begins on a new lead-covered airplane, except this time the lead is twice as thick. It's a supply-side theory: The greater the weight, the greater the buoyancy.

"Solomon said, 'The thing that has been is the thing that shall be; and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: There is nothing new under the sun.' Or, to put it a slightly different way, a man walked into the house with a handful of dog waste and said, 'Look what I almost stepped in.'"