Just as in any war, the battle against sexual harassment in the workplace brings collateral damage.
And although director Woody Allen is a skeevy perv, we have to admit that his warning that the admirable fight to protect working women could morph into a witch hunt is now coming true.
Take Garrison Keillor, whose popular radio show &#8220;A Prairie Home Companion&#8221; was once heard by some 4 million people each Sunday. He was fired this week from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) after an allegation of inappropriate behavior with an individual who worked with him.
Said Keillor: &#8220;I put my hand on a woman&#8217;s bare back. I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it. We were friends. We continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called.&#8221;
And he went on <a href="http://www.startribune.com/read-garrison-keillor-s-full-email-to-the-star-tribune/460827763/">in his statement</a> to say: &#8220;Anyone who ever was around my show can tell you that I was the least physically affection person in the building. Actors hug, musicians hug, people were embracing every Saturday night left and right, and I stood off in the corner like a stone statue. If I had a dollar for every woman who asked to take a selfie with me and who slipped an arm around me and let it drift down below the beltline, I&#8217;d have at least a hundred dollars. So this is poetic irony of a high order.&#8221;
Now, we don&#8217;t know the veracity of the allegation against him, but so far &#8212; unlike nearly all the others, like movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and &#8220;Today&#8221; show host Matt Lauer &#8212; no other woman has come forward to allege other inappropriate behavior by Keillor.
&#8220;Based on what we currently know, there are no similar allegations involving other staff,&#8221; MPR said, noting the alleged incident occurred last month.
But we do know that Keillor is plenty peeved about working his whole life and, at age 75, watching his hard-fought reputation disappear in a flash.
&#8220;It&#8217;s astonishing that 50 years of hard work can be trashed in a morning by an accusation,&#8221; Keillor wrote Wednesday on Facebook. &#8220;I always believed in hard work and now it feels sort of meaningless. Only a friend can hurt you this badly. I think I have to leave the country in order to walk around in public and not feel accusing glances.&#8221;
In another message to Facebook friends, Keillor said he had a &#8220;good conversation&#8221; with his wife about what they really need in life. &#8220;I need her and I need to have work to do and I need to live someplace where we can both be happy,&#8221; he reportedly wrote. &#8220;I think we should move east and leave the past behind.&#8221;
But we should note that Keillor responded in just the way you would expect the avuncular, soft-spoken man from &#8220;Prairie Companion&#8221; would. In another post, he said, &#8220;I am sorry for all the poets whose work I won&#8217;t be reading on the radio and sorry for the people who will lose work on account of this. But my profound feeling is that of gratitude, especially to my wife Jenny, and for this painful experience that has brought us even closer together.&#8221;
The war against sexual predators may have just taken down an innocent man.

Is Garrison Keillor Just Collateral Damage In The War Against Sexual Predators?

Garrison Keillor

Harvey Weinstein

Matt Lauer

On Wednesday, Garrison Keillor, the ostensibly genial but fiercely leftist host of National Public Radio’s “Prairie Home Companion,” which he hosted for 42 years from 1974 to 2016, announced he had been fired by NPR over allegations of inappropriate behavior
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Garrison Keillor says he&#8217;s been fired by Minnesota Public Radio over allegations of inappropriate behavior.
— Steve Peoples (@sppeoples) <a href="https://twitter.com/sppeoples/status/935922048706207744?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 29, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
Although Keillor retired last year from “Prairie Home Companion,” he <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/garrison-keillor-fired-alleged-improper-behavior-1062460?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_source=t.co&amp;utm_medium=referral">still produced </a>&#8220;The Writer&#8217;s Almanac&#8221; for syndication for NPR. He followed up after announcing that he had been fired from Minnesota Public Radio by stating he was fired over &#8220;a story that I think is more interesting and more complicated than the version MPR heard.&#8221;
Keillor’s apparent firing has one of the most ironically hilarious moments in recent media history: less than 24 hours before, he posted an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/al-franken-should-resign-thats-absurd/2017/11/28/d33e2d8a-d482-11e7-a986-d0a9770d9a3e_story.html?utm_term=.ee63659512e6">op-ed in The Washington Post</a> titled, “Al Franken should resign? That’s absurd.” In Keillor’s piece, he viciously attacked President Trump, writing:
<blockquote>The greatest absurdity of our time is You Know Whom, which goes without saying but I will anyway. What his election showed is that a considerable number of people, in order to demonstrate their frustration with the world as it is, are willing to drive their car, with their children in the backseat, over a cliff, smash the radiator, bust an axle, and walk away feeling good about themselves. No other president in modern times has been held in contempt by a preponderance of people from the moment he said, “So help me, God.” The playboy blather, the smirk of privilege, the stunning contempt for factual truth — how can the country come together when the president has nothing in common with 98 percent of the rest of us?</blockquote>
The playboy blather? Hmm.
Keillor then truculently defended Franken, writing that talk of Franken resigning from the Senate is “pure absurdity”:
<blockquote>And then there is Sen. Al Franken. He did USO tours overseas when he was in the comedy biz. He did it from deep in his heart, out of patriotism, and the show he did was broad comedy of a sort that goes back to the Middle Ages. Shakespeare used those jokes now and then and so did Bob Hope and Joey Heatherton when they entertained the troops. If you thought that Al stood outdoors at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and told stories about small-town life in the Midwest, you were wrong. Miss Tweeden knew what the game was and played her role and on the flight home, in a spirit of low comedy, Al ogled her and pretended to grab her and a picture was taken. Eleven years later, a talk show host in L.A., she goes public with her embarrassment, and there is talk of resignation. This is pure absurdity and the atrocity it leads to is a code of public deadliness. No kidding.</blockquote>
Back in August 2016, when Trump was trailing badly in the polls against Hillary Clinton, Keillor <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-donald-trump-losing-garrison-keillor-20160831-story.html">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>You are in the old tradition of locker room ranting and big honkers in the steam room, sitting naked, talking man talk, griping about the goons and ginks and lousy workmanship and the uppity broads and the great lays and how you vanquished your enemies at the bank. Profanity is your natural language and vulgar words so as not to offend the Christers but the fans can still hear it and that&#8217;s something they love about you.</blockquote>
Doubling down, Keillor <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-manafort-donald-trump-tweets-20171030-story.html">wrote</a> in late October 2017:
<blockquote>Donald Trump is done. He couldn&#8217;t get elected dogcatcher in New York, his hometown. I was very, very nice about it. Very nice. But New Yorkers love dogs and he does not. There are 14 recorded instances of him kicking small dogs, and I have documentary proof of all but two of them. Plus many other instances of him running around grabbing women&#8217;s cats. Knocked on the door, grabbed the cat, walked away. Just to show that a famous rich guy could get away with it. Where is the apology?</blockquote>
Good question for Keillor the next time he looks in the mirror.

PBS Leftist Garrison Keillor Reportedly Fired For ‘Inappropriate Behavior’

Donald Trump

National Public Radio (NPR)

Sexual Misconduct

Long-time public radio celebrity Garrison Keillor, who fancies himself a satirist of the highest order, has decided that because Donald Trump was elected and Christians should have known better, Keillor is giving up Christianity.
Writing in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-me-searching-for-a-new-religion/2017/01/17/361d575e-dcf0-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.3428ddcdc5f1&amp;wpisrc=nl_opinions&amp;wpmm=1">The Washington Post</a>, the distraught Keillor commences his bewailing with what he feels is an accurate description of the president-elect:
<blockquote>
Boy President heads for Washington to be sworn into office, pumping his fist, mooning the media, giving the stinky finger to whomever irks him, doing his end-zone dance, promising to build the wall, cut taxes, create jobs, provide great health insurance for EVERYONE and send his son-in-law to the Middle East to solve that little problem . . .
</blockquote>
Then he laments:
<blockquote>
So I&#8217;ve been shopping around for a new religion to see me through the next four years. Too many of my fellow Christians voted for selfishness and for degradation of the beautiful world God created. I guess they figured that by the time the planet was a smoky wasteland, they&#8217;d be nice and comfy in heaven, so wotthehell. Anyhow, I&#8217;m looking around for other options.
</blockquote>
Gee, Garrison, it&#8217;s not as though Christians are forcing you to stay. It&#8217;s not as though those gun-totin&#8217; &#8211; oops, sorry, didn&#8217;t mean to mention guns.
Keillor continues that &#8220;Buddhism involves way too much sitting still for my taste . . . Hinduism includes sacred cows, and my experience with cattle makes it impossible for me to revere them.&#8221;
Then he equates Judaism with Islam, writing, as any contrite former Christian would: &#8220;Islam is great and so is Judaism but they&#8217;re so complicated! You can&#8217;t just walk into a temple and listen to a holy person and burst into tears and throw yourself down on the floor, as you can with Christianity, and say, &#8216;I believe!&#8217; and get dunked in water and, shazam, you&#8217;re in.&#8221;
Yup, that Christianity sure is a durned easy way to the Good Life Upstairs, requiring nothing but a simple statement of faith. It&#8217;s kind of odd that Christians revere the Ten Commandments, though.
With what does Keillor choose to comfort himself? &#8220;Confucianism, accepting the sacredness of confusion. Life is messy and it always has been.&#8221;
Of course, Confucius also said, &#8220;Nine things there are of which the superior man should be mindful: to be clear in vision, quick in hearing, genial in expression, respectful in demeanor, true in word, serious in duty, inquiring in doubt, firmly self-controlled in anger, just and fair when the way to success opens out before him.&#8221;
The geniality of expression, respectfulness in demeanor, and self-control in anger somehow were missing from Keillor&#8217;s initial diatribe tarteting Trump.
Perhaps it&#8217;s because Keillor is not a superior man. 
Perhaps he should be a better Christian, or at least, be better off as a Christian.

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Garrison Keillor

Is Garrison Keillor Just Collateral Damage In The War Against Sexual Predators?

PBS Leftist Garrison Keillor Reportedly Fired For ‘Inappropriate Behavior’

Garrison Keillor On Trump Presidency: I’m Through With Christianity