I can’t recollect ever having seen a progressivist make such a complete and utter fool of himself by popping off about something he clearly knows absolutely nothing about, anointing himself as an “expert” by way of girding himself for an outraged rant that bears not even a nodding acquaintance with reality, as can be viewed here:

Three-hundred thousand bikers spent Memorial Day weekend roaring around Washington in tribute to our war dead, and I stood on Constitution Avenue Sunday afternoon watching a river of them go by, waiting for a gap in the procession so I could cross over to the Mall and look at pictures. The street had been closed off for them and they motored on by, some flying the Stars and Stripes and the black MIA-POW flag, honking, revving their engines, an endless celebration of internal combustion.

A patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti; the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer irritation of the thing. Somehow a person associates Memorial Day with long moments of silence when you summon up mental images of men huddled together on LSTs and pilots revving up B-24s and infantrymen crouched behind piles of rubble steeling themselves for the next push.

You don’t quite see the connection between that and these fat men with ponytails on Harleys.

Not because it isn’t there — actually, it is — but because you’re too blinkered by doltish prejudice to see it.

After hearing a few thousand bikes go by, you think maybe we could airlift these gentlemen to Baghdad to show their support of the troops in a more tangible way. It took 20 minutes until a gap appeared and then a mob of us pedestrians flooded across the street and the parade of bikes had to stop for us, and on we went to show our patriotism by looking at exhibits at the Smithsonian or, in my case, hiking around the National Gallery, which, after you’ve watched a few thousand Harleys pass, seems like an outpost of civilization.

Keillor, you stupid fuck, the bikers who originally organized the Rolling Thunder rally were Vietnam vets, almost to a man. A little history, not in hopes of educating an inflexible, ineducable left-wing idiot like Garrison Keillor, but rather to mock his purblind ignorance:

It was a silent collective cry of American Prisoners of War (POWs) left behind that prompted Ray Manzo, Corporal U.S.M.C., to try in some small way to make things right. As the summer of 1987 approached, Manzo observed some veterans by the Reflecting Pool near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. and asked them for help. His idea: Host a motorcycle run in the nation’s capital to show the country and the world that abandoned American soldiers in Vietnam still mattered to their fellow servicemen and the country for which they sacrificed their freedom.

From that day on, things began to happen. Fellow veterans embraced his idea and began to help. There was retired Army Sergeant Major John Holland, head of the American Foundation for Accountability of POW/MIAs, Ted Sampley with Homecoming II Project at the Last Firebase vigil, retired Marine 1st Sergeant Walt Sides, president of the non-profit Warriors Inc, and Bob Schmitt who had a POW family member.

Read more for a demonstration in words of Keillor’s risible cluelessness. Keillor could have found all this out in about two seconds, by Googling “Rolling Thunder Rally” and viewing the results. But like most liberals, he’s so goddamned arrogant, so mulishly secure in the knowledge of his own intellectual superiority and righteousness, that no research is necessary to bolster his preconceived notions. “Long moments of silence?” We could sure use a lot more of those from brain-dead jackasses of Keillor’s odious ilk. But we’ll never get to enjoy any, not when liberal preconceptions are standing athwart independent thought, yelling “Stop!”

The rally is today attended by literally tens of thousands of US service veterans. In fact, I’d be perfectly comfortable positing that there are far, far more vets riding those loud Harleys that so offend his effete-snob sensibilities than there are working for NPR, hosting teeth-grindingly dull radio shows so chocked with bumptious smarm as to cause actual physical pain, and writing priggish newspaper columns sermons for liberal propaganda outlets.

It’s plain to see that jerks like Keillor don’t know the first thing about bikers, but don’t these people know anything at all about America’s servicemen and women?

Never mind; don’t answer that. Of course they don’t. They prove it every time they open their drooling yaps. Next time Keillor decides to squeeze out another of these flatulent, fact-free excretions, he really ought to consider just shutting the fuck up and flushing, instead of submitting the disgusting result of his grunting and straining to an editor for publication — for his own sake, if no one else’s.