Armchair Philosophy

It's discouraging
seeing so many people go so wrong
all at once. It makes you question the idea that each of us has
unlimited potential for good.

Who
said that?  And what was the subject?  

The
quote comes from an editorial by href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrison_Keillor" rel="tag">Garrison
Keillor, host of " href="http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/" rel="tag">A
Prairie Home Companion."  He was brought up a member
of the Plymouth
Brethren, but went through a Lutheran phase, and now is an
Episcopalian.  None of that is pertinent, at the moment, but I
thought it was interesting.
Anyway, here is the context of the
quote:

Congress, which once spent
an entire year investigating a married man's attempt to cover up an
illicit act of oral sex, has shown no curiosity whatsoever about a war
that the Bush administration elected to wage that has killed and maimed
hundreds of thousands and led our own people to commit war crimes and
squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and degenerated into civil
war. The contrast is deafening. Republicans haven't tolerated much
dissent in their ranks, and now the herd finds itself on the wrong side
of the river. It's discouraging seeing so many people go so wrong all
at once. It makes you question the idea that each of us has unlimited
potential for good.

Washington is a city where a
bill to relax air-pollution standards would be called the Clean Air Act
and a bill to protect government officials from war-crimes prosecution
would be called the Military Commissions Act, and so a man's statement
that he knows who he is and who his friends are needs to be taken as
meaning the opposite, a cry for help. You come to office as a uniter
and you wind up doing the opposite. You stand for American values and
you wind up defending torture and waste of resources. Knowing who you
are is a minimal adult requirement, and you don't get there by being an
object of attention. Retirement is recommended. The sooner the better.

The
entire piece can be found href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0611010014nov01,1,2624704.column?coll=chi-opinionfront-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true">here.
 Although the part I copied is not particularly funny, the
essay does contain plenty of the droll humor that made him famous.

I'm
not quite bold enough to copy the entire essay here, but the title is The
retiring type? Don't look my way.  If it disappears
behind the pay wall, you might be able to find it href="http://www.furl.net/">somewhere.