We Have Aways Been At War With Christmas

From me, 20 years ago, in the Haloscan days.  Also the pre-YouTube days, so I have swapped out a long-dead link to a web page with an MP3 (miracle!) for a video.

Back when we were trying to construct salient political and media critiques from bearskins and stone knives.

Mithras, you magnificent bastard! 

 

I read your book!

General George S. Santa whips up the 101st Chairborne-Again before dispatching them into the trenches to lay waste to Liberals in the name of the Prince of Peace…

(And if you're so inclined, you can click here to get the full, Sensurround Effect of this fiery rhetoric…)

Be seated.

I want you to remember that no bastard ever won the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his dogma.

Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the War for Christmas is a lot of horse dung. Fundymericans, traditionally, love to fight for Jesus. All real Fundymericans love the sting of battle.

When you were kids you all admired the champion draft deferrer, the biggest rich kid, John Birch, and the guy whose daddy could hire the toughest boxer. Fundymericans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser…except for the whole War of Northern Aggression thing.

And the Jim Crow thing.

And the “Segregation Now” thing.

And the “Loving vs. Virginia” thing.

But other than that, Fundymericans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Fundymericans have never lost and will never lose a war…and Vietnam does NOT count because it was only a “police action” and not a Real War like the War on Christmas. And anyway, we coulda won – were on the verge of winning – when we were betraaaayed by Cronkite and Jane Fonda and the dirty hippies.

Anyhoo, the very thought of losing is hateful to Fundymericans. As is the thought of Tolerance. And Science. And Causality. And Compromise. And every other religion in the history of the Universe.

Now, a Chairborne-Again army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality and “thinking for yourself” and “asking questions of the Dear Leader” stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Washington Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about the why fornicating and terrorism are both caused by feminists, queers, teaching Evolution in the public schools and the ACLU.

Now we have the finest food, Chick Tracts, the best hair, and the most extremely heterosexual men in the world. You know, by God I...I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against, by God, I do. We're not just going to shoot these Liberal “Good Will Towards Men” bastards; we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of Santa’s Sleigh. We're going to murder those lousy “Tolerant”, “Turn the other check” bastards by the Hanukah Bushel.

Now, some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chickenhawk out under fire. Don't worry about that.

I can assure you that you will, just like your fathers and grandfathers before you.

That is, if this were an actual “war” war. Then we’d just send poor Negros, Spics and hillbillies off to do our fighting for us.

But this is just some faked-up Holiday Hatred extruded by knee-biters like Bill O'Reilly to keep the stoopids distracted and divided, facing the wrong direction, and screaming wrong slogans so they won’t notice how routinely and ineptly Dear Leader’s Administration lies to them and fucks them over.

The Liberals are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood in the name of the Redeemer. Shoot them in the belly for the sake of the Lamb of God. When you put your hand into a bunch of Nondenominational “Holiday” goo that a moment before was your best friend's Manger Scene, you'll know what to do!

Now there's another thing I want you to remember: I don't want to get any messages that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Liberals do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested into holding onto anything except the enemy.

To celebrate the fake birthday of the King of Kings, we're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. In the name of the Son of the Living God, we're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like mouthbreathers through a WalMart on double-coupon day!

Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back to you Mommy’s Basement, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what did you do in the great Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in Iraq?

You can proudly say, "Well, first I called everyone that didn't support the Dear Leader a traitor and a coward. Then I cowered under the bed like a little bitch while far better men and women than I went off to bleed and die to cover the margin call on my Dear Leader's stupid, reckless gamble. Then I re-elected him! Then I went out and spit on a dirty Jew to commemorate the fake birthday of my Lord and Savior."

Alright, now you sons-a-bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful fucktards into a completely faked-up, Potemkin battle anytime, anywhere.

Like, say, Easter.

That's all.

Burn The Lifeboats

 

Ho, Ho, Ho

I've heard it bruited (look it up) about that the Rude Pundit recently wrote a thing about the time he was a mall Santa.

Cool, cool.

But does he have photographic evidence of himself wearing the red and white?  Because I do.  

That picture above?  That's me circa 1977 or 1978, when I worked in the stockroom of the Sears store in Park Forest, which was an objectively awesome job.  

The store is long gone, as is the building.  This building.

The basement beneath the building where I worked is also gone.  

The entire Park Forest Plaza it anchored has been virtually abandoned and then feebly revived a few times. 

The  indoor mall that killed it -- the Lincoln Mall -- has itself been killed by online sales and abandoned.

But the photograph of me wearing the suit remains.

The regular Santa guy had failed to show.  Drunk, probably, and they needed someone in a hurry to put on the suit, sit in the chair and chat with the kids while the mothers of Park Forest photographed Old St. Nick dandling their little ones on his knee.   

Physically, I made a terrible Santa.  By that age I had hit my full height.  6' 8".  I was rail-thin -- weighted maybe 130 pounds soaking wet.  Bony knees.  So not exactly...

He had a broad face and a little round belly,

that shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf...

But the kids didn't care.  And my boss John -- who was an excellent boss -- just needed someone in a hurry who could sit for a few hours and not scare the kids, and why the hell not? The beard and wig were old-polyester itchy and the suit smelled ancient, but again, why the hell not?  It helped John out of a jam, and I got to be part of that merry little seasonal conspiracy between parents and department stores.  All in all, an easy gig.

My mom got wind of what I was up to and came by to take that picture of me.  Bless her heart for hanging onto it and eventually passing it along to me.  Which, in the fullness of time, allowed me to say this: "Check and mate, Rude Pundit!"

Hit The Tip Jar To Stay Off My "Naughty" List.

Professional Left Podcast Episode 864: President Musk ...and More Royko

"It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway', but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies." -- Mike Royko

Links:  

• 
  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

And He'll Huff And He'll Puff...

 

...and the whole rest of that story.

Except, in the real world, Republican weaklings and cowards keep scampering to weaker and weaker shelters.

From The Washington Post:

Republicans reject spending bill, under pressure from Trump and Musk

Unless Congress acts, a government shutdown deadline looms just past midnight Saturday.

Republicans rejected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan plan to avert a government shutdown, as President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined a broad swath of the House GOP on Wednesday to condemn a compromise bill full of Democratic policy priorities.

The rebuke, which built steadily through the day and culminated with a long written statement from Trump in the late afternoon, has forced Johnson back to the drawing board on a plan to prevent a Christmastime shutdown — and maintain the support of his chaotic conference to be reelected as speaker early next year.

“Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead,” Musk boasted on X, the social media site he owns, after he spent the day blasting the legislation. “The voice of the people has triumphed!”

Johnson has not outlined a backup plan, and multiple people familiar with the real-time conversations said the next step remains unclear, as leaders would need significant support from both parties — and Trump — to pass a funding extension. If Congress doesn’t extend the deadline, most federal operations would shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, though the effects of a shutdown wouldn’t fully kick in until Monday...

Wow, so there really is a War on Christmas.  And its the Republicans who are trying to blow old St. Nick out of the sky.

Well Feliz Navidad, kids, and a Happy FAFO New Year to all the meatbags who voted for this clusterfuck.  

Burn The Lifeboats

The Fake War on Christmas Is Not Meant to Be Won

It is meant to be continuous.

From the WaPo:

Pope Francis is waging a war on Christmas. Christians should join him.

Donald Trump's version of Christmas has nothing to do with Christ.

Last week, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly had good news for his viewers — the war on Christmas had finally ended. “We won!” O’Reilly declared.

What were O’Reilly’s metrics for measuring this great victory over the secularists who he saw as so hell-bent on ruining Christianity’s great feast? Simple: The number of stores using “Merry Christmas!” instead of “Happy Holidays!” has increased in the past decade.

But as O’Reilly noted, there are still some companies out there who won’t oblige with the victor’s demands that Christmas greetings be done the right way. Don’t worry, O’Reilly assured his viewers, there’s a new president in town, “and that’s bad news for them, because Donald Trump is on the case.”

...

Unfortunately for O’Reilly and Trump, there’s still one person they must defeat in this self-perpetuating war on Christmas. It’s Pope Francis, the 80-year-old leader of 1.2 billion Catholics across the globe.

“Christmas is a charade!” Francis said last year...

So it seems like the right time to haul out the traditional  Fake War on Christmas ornaments from 2005...

"My mission is to make it up to the North Pole before the 25th.

There's a Jolly Old Elf up there who's gone insane.

I'm supposed to kill him."

Then, later...

Evil Liberal: "Who are all these people?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Yeah, well... They think you have come to take him

away. I hope that isn't true."

Evil Liberal: "Take who away ?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Him. Saint Nick. The Big Elf. These are all his Helpers, as far as you can see."

Evil Liberal: "Could we, uh, talk to Saint Nick?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Hey, man, you don't talk to the Saint. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a elf-toymaker in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you.

And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you on his lap, and he'll say do you know that “ant” is the middle word in Santa? If you can know who has been naughty and who as been nice when all about you are getting shitty toys and socks and blaming it on you…if you can trust your elves when all men doubt you -- I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little elf, I'm a little elf, he's, he's The Claus, man.

I should have been a bag of remaindered WalMart Barbies being sold out the trunk of an El Dorado on a dead-drunk Sunday Morning on Maxwell Street -- I mean --

And finally, the tragic denouement.

"The ho-ho-horror. The ho-ho-horror..."

Then He took the venti, half-whole milk, one quarter 1%, one quarter non-fat, extra hot, split quad shots, no foam latte, with whip, two packets of Splenda, one sugar in the raw, a dollop of vanilla syrup and three sprinkles of cinnamon, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them, saying...

"Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."

From CBS news:

Starbucks accused of "war on Christmas" with holiday cups

For millions of coffee-drinkers, the arrival of Starbucks' holiday-themed cups means Christmas is on the way.

"It's huge. People who don't even go to Starbucks regularly, they come during the holidays because we have the red cups," Starbucks employee Skylar Shelley said.

But some critics say the image of this year's holiday cup was like waking up to a lump of coal Christmas morning, reports CBS News correspondent Don Dahler. Unlike previous years when the cups came adorned with holiday-inspired images ranging from snowmen to ornaments, this year's design is just a plain red cup.

The topic percolated on social media, where Evangelical groups accused the company of waging a "war on Christmas."
...

Wingnuts whining about imaginary affronts to their fake Christianity has become as much a part of the holiday season as stringing popcorn ornaments, space-heater fires and alcohol-fueled eruptions of barely suppressed WASP intra-family rage.

Breaking Out The Ornaments

Because traditions are important.

Ahem...

Whether you believe in the time-honored story...

"But I didn't know until this day,

that it was...Judas...all along."

Or killer robot Santa Governors

from the future...

Schwarzenegger orders mass layoffs, unpaid furloughs

Union leaders for state employees vow to challenge the legality of the mandatory time off, which amounts to about a 9% pay cut according to the governor's finance department.

By Patrick McGreevy and Jordan Rau
December 20, 2008

Reporting from Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday ordered mass layoffs and unpaid furloughs for state workers starting in February to address California's growing fiscal crisis.

Under his executive order, 238,000 employees will be forced to take off two unpaid days per month through June 30, 2010. Managers will receive either the furlough or an equivalent salary reduction during the same period.


H.D. Palmer, spokesman for Schwarzenegger's finance department, said the mandatory time off is the equivalent of about a 9% pay cut for affected workers. He said the furloughs would save the state more than $1.2 billion.

...
Schwarzenegger attempted a few months ago to unilaterally reduce the pay of state employees, but his order never took effect. State Controller John Chiang said the state's payroll system was incapable of carrying it out.
...

...who can only be stopped with an ancient and terrible weapon called COBOL.

Schwarzenegger pay plans thwarted by COBOL

By Iain Thomson
7 August 2008 07:39AM

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans to reduce all state employees pay to the minimum wage are being blocked because the payroll system is run on COBOL.

Schwarzenegger signed an executive order last week to cut the salary of the state’s 200,000 employees to the minimum wage until the state budget, currently 36 days behind schedule, is passed.

But State Controller John Chiang told the Senate Committee on Governmental Organization that this was impossible as the payroll system was written 30 years ago in COBOL and there weren’t enough programmers to do the job.

Chiang estimated that with current resources it would take six months to make the change, and then nine to ten months to reverse them.

"Pragmatically, we just can't get the system to work in a timely manner for us to implement payment of minimum wage," Chiang said, according to the Sacramento Bee.
...

Whether you believe the War on Christmas is a traditional war to be fought in a traditional way...

I want you to remember that no bastard ever won
the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma.

He won it by making the other poor,
dumb bastard die for his dogma.

Or an insurgency with murkier rules and darker purposes.

My mission is to make it up to the North Pole before the 25th.



There's a Jolly Old Elf up there who's gone insane.

I'm supposed to kill him.

Then, later...

Evil Liberal: Who are all these people?

Bill O’Reilly: Yeah, well... They think you have come to take him
away. I hope that isn't true.

Evil Liberal: Take who away ?

Bill O’Reilly: Him. Saint Nick. The Big Elf.
These are all his Helpers, as far as you can see.

Evil Liberal: Could we, uh, talk to Saint Nick?

Bill O’Reilly: Hey, man, you don't talk to the Saint.
You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind.
He's an elf-toymaker in the classic sense.
I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right?
And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you.

And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you
on his lap, and he'll say do you know that “ant”
is the middle word in Santa?
If you can know who has been naughty
and who as been nice when all about you
are getting shitty toys and socks and blaming it on you…
if you can trust your elves when all men doubt you --
I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little elf,
I'm a little elf, he's, he's The Claus, man.

I should have been a bag of remaindered WalMart Barbies
being sold out the trunk of an El Dorado
on a dead-drunk Sunday Morning on Maxwell Street -- I mean --

And finally, the tragic denoument.

The ho-ho-horror. The ho-ho-horror...

Have a happy, safe and merry uprising.

Time To Get The War-on-Christmas Ornaments Out of The Attic

From 2005:

"My mission is to make it up to the North Pole before the 25th.

There's a Jolly Old Elf up there who's gone insane.

I'm supposed to kill him."

Then, later...

Evil Liberal: "Who are all these people?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Yeah, well... They think you have come to take him
away. I hope that isn't true."

Evil Liberal: "Take who away ?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Him. Saint Nick. The Big Elf. These are all his Helpers, as far as you can see."

Evil Liberal: "Could we, uh, talk to Saint Nick?"

Bill O’Reilly: "Hey, man, you don't talk to the Saint. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a elf-toymaker in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you.

And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you on his lap, and he'll say do you know that “ant” is the middle word in Santa? If you can know who has been naughty and who as been nice when all about you are getting shitty toys and socks and blaming it on you…if you can trust your elves when all men doubt you -- I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little elf, I'm a little elf, he's, he's The Claus, man.

I should have been a bag of remaindered WalMart Barbies being sold out the trunk of an El Dorado on a dead-drunk Sunday Morning on Maxwell Street -- I mean --

And finally, the tragic denouement.

"The ho-ho-horror. The ho-ho-horror..."

The Rent Boi on Christmas*

As long as there is a nickle to be hustled out of any rube anywhere, Bill Kristol's

Indestructible 


Hillbilly


 Kill Bot


Will

Always be with us.

* Even though it completely shitcans the entire scansion of the rhyme, while I was sleeping, referring to a whore as a "whore" has apparently become offensive some number of (probably imaginary) people who never heard of Jeff Gannon.

Management regrets the error.

Time to Break Out

The seasonal ornaments.

A War-on-Christmas Repost:

I want you To remember that no bastard ever won the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma.

He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his dogma.

You can still hear a few crack and pops of faraway artillery from the wingnut rear guard itching to gin up fight, but the real War on Christmas mongers -- the Hate Media outlets, who always need some Fresh!Fake!Outrage! to keep the Pig People amped up and watching -- has gotten bored with it. Like many a toy from Mithrasmases gone by, the GWOX's (Global War on Xmas) paint has faded. Its moving parts have worn out. And it goes through batteries like David Vitter goes through hookers.

Not that any of that matters.

Swap "Clinton Impeachment" out for GWOX and you get exactly the same rhetoric. Swap GWOX for Teabagging, ditto. Swap it for ACORNoia, ditto. Swap ACORN for Obama-the-Kenyan-Usurper, ditto. And so on, and on, and on without end.

It is the same poison with different food coloring offered up to those millions of criminally delusional citizens who cling to their belief that Barack Obama (the guy who buddied up to the Conservatives in his class at Harvard, then buddied up to his Republican colleagues in Springfield, and who has again and again sacrificed or cripplingly compromised core Liberal policies and ideals to mollify some nonexistent group of "reasonable" Republicans) is a really secret Commie who has been (as was explained to me at a party last week) steeped -- steeped I tell you -- "in the ways of radicals like Saul Alinsky" every bit as fiercely and irrationally as any Evangelical clings to Creationism and The Rapture.

For these people, I have no hope at all. None. For 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they have no capacity for introspection; no ability to recognize that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in Alinsky, but in themselves.

And for 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they will always fall for the Internal Enemy bullshit being marketed to them by the very people whose policies are actually fucking them and the country the claim to love into the ground.

And so I bring you another driftglass seasonally appropriate "War on Christmas" repost (stolen from the movie "Patton" and cruelly forced to serve wicked, Liberal ends by me), because, the War Behind the Global War on Xmas is the one that never ends.

Men, all this stuff you've heard about Pig People not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the War for Christmas is a lot of horse dung. Pig People, traditionally, love to fight for Jesus. All real Pig People love the sting of battle.

When you were kids you all admired the champion draft deferrer, the biggest rich kid, John Birch, and the guy whose daddy could hire the toughest boxer. Pig People love a winner and will not tolerate a loser…except for the whole War of Northern Aggression thing.

And the Jim Crow thing.

And the “Segregation Now” thing.

And the “Loving vs. Virginia” thing.

But other than that, Pig People play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Pig People have never lost and will never lose a war…and Vietnam does NOT count because it was only a “police action” and not a Real War like the War on Christmas. And anyway, we coulda won – were on the verge of winning – when we were betraaaayed by Cronkite and Jane Fonda and the dirty hippies.

Anyhoo, the very thought of losing is hateful to Pig People. As is the thought of Tolerance.
And Science.
And Causality.
And Compromise.
And every other religion in the history of the Universe.

Now, a Chairborne-Again army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality and “thinking for yourself” and “asking gotcha questions of the Sarah Palin” stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Washington Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about the why fornicating and terrorism are both caused by feminists, queers, teaching Evolution in the public schools and the ACLU.

Now we have the finest food, Chick Tracts, the best hair, and the most extremely heterosexual men in the world. You know, by God I...I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against, by God, I do. We're not just going to shoot these Liberal “Good Will Towards Men” bastards; we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of Santa’s Sleigh.

We're going to murder those lousy “Tolerant”, “Turn the other check” bastards by the Hanukah Bushel.

Now, some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chickenhawk out under fire. Don't worry about that.

I can assure you that you will, just like your fathers and grandfathers before you.

That is, if this were an actual “war” war. Then we’d just send poor Negros, Spics and hillbillies off to do our fighting for us.

But this is just some faked-up Holiday Hatred invented by knee-biters like Bill O'Reilly to keep the stoopids distracted and divided, facing the wrong direction, and screaming the wrong slogans so they never noticed how routinely and ineptly the Cheney Administration lied to them and fucked them over.

The Liberals are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood in the name of the Redeemer. Shoot them in the belly for the sake of the Lamb of God.

When you put your hand into a bunch of Nondenominational “Holiday” goo that a moment before was your best friend's Manger Scene, you'll know what to do!

Now there's another thing I want you to remember: I don't want to get any messages that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Liberals do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested into holding onto anything except the enemy.

To celebrate the fake birthday of the King of Kings, we're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. In the name of the Son of the Living God, we're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like mouthbreathers through a WalMart on double-coupon day!

Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back to you Mommy’s Basement, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what did you do in the great Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in Iraq?

You can proudly say, "Well, first I called everyone that didn't support the Cheney Administration a traitor and a coward. Then I cowered under the bed like a little bitch while far better men and women than I went off to bleed and die to cover the margin call on the Cheney Administration's stupid, reckless gamble. Then I re-elected him! Then I went out and spit on a dirty Jew to commemorate the fake birthday of my Lord and Savior."

Alright, now you sons-a-bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful fucktards into a completely faked-up, Potemkin battle anytime, anywhere.

Like, say, Easter.

That's all.

Your Friday Podcast -- Christmas Edition

The best way to cheer yourself
is to try to cheer somebody else up.

-- Mark Twain

Buy the Button, take the Ride...

This mint-condition memento of the final days of the Mainstream Media is available at Blue Gal's Cafepress Store (and keep listening later in the year for an opportunity to win one). And the Podcast Donate Button button below allows listeners to throw a contribution specifically towards the podcast. Thanks for your listenership and support!

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

What Would Christmas Be

Without Sarah Silverman calling Santa a dick?

Of course, like most holiday standards, this is NSFW.

'Tis The Season

The bluesy holiday standard that rivals "The Gift of the Magi" for sketching a fast Christmas masterpiece out of a handful of perfect, aching details.

Charlie, I think about you
Every time I pass the filling station
On account of all the grease
You used to wear in your hair.
Still have that record --
Little Anthony and The Imperials.
Someone stole my record player
How do you like that?

I Want You To Remember

That no bastard ever won the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma.

He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his dogma.

As Chris Beam notes here in Slate, the War to End All Wassails is basically over for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that the Reality that there never really was one finally swamped the Fox News propaganda:

...another recent story alleged that a school in Taunton, Mass., suspended a second-grader and required him to undergo psychological evaluation because when the teacher asked the class to draw something that reminded them of Christmas, the boy drew a picture of Jesus on the cross. The child's father cried religious bias. As it turns out, the boy was not suspended and the teacher had referred the child to psychological services because he had identified the person on the cross as himself. The teacher feared it might be a cry for help.

You can still hear a few crack and pops of faraway artillery from the wingnut rear guard itching to gin up fight, but the real War on Christmas mongers -- the Hate Media outlets, who always need some Fresh!Fake!Outrage! to keep the Pig People amped up and watching -- has gotten bored with it. Like many a toy from Mithrasmases gone by, the GWOX's (Global War on Xmas) paint has faded. Its moving parts have worn out. And it goes through batteries like David Vitter goes through hookers.

Not that any of that matters.

Swap "Clinton Impeachment" out for GWOX and you get exactly the same rhetoric. Swap GWOX for Teabagging, ditto. Swap it for ACORNoia, ditto. Swap ACORN for Obama-the-Kenyan-Usurper, ditto. And so on, and on, and on without end.

It is the same poison with different food coloring offered up to those millions of criminally delusional citizens who cling to their belief that Barack Obama (the guy who buddied up to the Conservatives in his class at Harvard, then buddied up to his Republican colleagues in Springfield, and who has again and again sacrificed or cripplingly compromised core Liberal policies and ideals to mollify some nonexistent group of "reasonable" Republicans) is a really secret Commie who has been (as was explained to me at a party last week) " steeped I tell you in the ways of radicals like Saul Alinsky" every bit as fiercely and irrationally as any Evangelical clings to Creationism and The Rapture.

For these people, I have no hope at all. None. For 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they have no capacity for introspection; no ability to recognize that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in Alinsky, but in themselves.

And for 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they will always fall for the Internal Enemy bullshit being marketed to them by the very people whose policies are actually fucking them and the country the claim to love into the ground.

And so I bring you another driftglass seasonally appropriate "War on Christmas" repost (stolen from the movie "Patton" and cruelly forced to serve wicked, Liberal ends by me), because, the War Behind the Global War on Xmas is the one that never ends.

Men, all this stuff you've heard about Pig People not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the War for Christmas is a lot of horse dung. Pig People, traditionally, love to fight for Jesus. All real Pig People love the sting of battle.

When you were kids you all admired the champion draft deferrer, the biggest rich kid, John Birch, and the guy whose daddy could hire the toughest boxer. Pig People love a winner and will not tolerate a loser…except for the whole War of Northern Aggression thing.

And the Jim Crow thing.

And the “Segregation Now” thing.

And the “Loving vs. Virginia” thing.

But other than that, Pig People play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Pig People have never lost and will never lose a war…and Vietnam does NOT count because it was only a “police action” and not a Real War like the War on Christmas. And anyway, we coulda won – were on the verge of winning – when we were betraaaayed by Cronkite and Jane Fonda and the dirty hippies.

Anyhoo, the very thought of losing is hateful to Pig People. As is the thought of Tolerance.
And Science.
And Causality.
And Compromise.
And every other religion in the history of the Universe.

Now, a Chairborne-Again army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality and “thinking for yourself” and “asking gotcha questions of the Sarah Palin” stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Washington Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about the why fornicating and terrorism are both caused by feminists, queers, teaching Evolution in the public schools and the ACLU.

Now we have the finest food, Chick Tracts, the best hair, and the most extremely heterosexual men in the world. You know, by God I...I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against, by God, I do. We're not just going to shoot these Liberal “Good Will Towards Men” bastards; we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of Santa’s Sleigh.

We're going to murder those lousy “Tolerant”, “Turn the other check” bastards by the Hanukah Bushel.

Now, some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chickenhawk out under fire. Don't worry about that.

I can assure you that you will, just like your fathers and grandfathers before you.

That is, if this were an actual “war” war. Then we’d just send poor Negros, Spics and hillbillies off to do our fighting for us.

But this is just some faked-up Holiday Hatred invented by knee-biters like Bill O'Reilly to keep the stoopids distracted and divided, facing the wrong direction, and screaming the wrong slogans so they never noticed how routinely and ineptly the Cheney Administration lied to them and fucked them over.

The Liberals are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood in the name of the Redeemer. Shoot them in the belly for the sake of the Lamb of God.

When you put your hand into a bunch of Nondenominational “Holiday” goo that a moment before was your best friend's Manger Scene, you'll know what to do!

Now there's another thing I want you to remember: I don't want to get any messages that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Liberals do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested into holding onto anything except the enemy.

To celebrate the fake birthday of the King of Kings, we're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. In the name of the Son of the Living God, we're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like mouthbreathers through a WalMart on double-coupon day!

Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back to you Mommy’s Basement, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what did you do in the great Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in Iraq?

You can proudly say, "Well, first I called everyone that didn't support the Cheney Administration a traitor and a coward. Then I cowered under the bed like a little bitch while far better men and women than I went off to bleed and die to cover the margin call on the Cheney Administration's stupid, reckless gamble. Then I re-elected him! Then I went out and spit on a dirty Jew to commemorate the fake birthday of my Lord and Savior."

Alright, now you sons-a-bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful fucktards into a completely faked-up, Potemkin battle anytime, anywhere.

Like, say, Easter.

That's all.

From The Sayings of Chairman Kringle

“Heightened Vigilance Will Defend our Jesusland!”

As I’m sure everyone knows, two of Santa’s most famous sayings are, “Mistletoe grows out of the barrel of a gun.” and “Christmas is war without bloodshed, while war is Christmas with bloodshed.”

This has been another driftglass seasonally appropriate "War on Christmas" repost.

Ho.

Ho.


Ho.

I Can No Longer Sit Back And Allow

Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious Yuletidey fluids.

Begun, this War on Christmas has.

From the LA Times:

Gap's Christmas cheer makes a boycott backfire
The American Family Assn. attacked Gap for not using the word 'Christmas' in its advertising -- but in fact it does, and in a big way too.

The Mississippi-based American Family Assn. last week issued a fatwa against Gap Inc. -- the retailing giant whose brands include Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic -- calling for a "two-month boycott over the company's failure to use the word 'Christmas' in its advertising to Christmas shoppers."

The War on Christmas season has officially begun.

Gap "does not use the word 'Christmas' to avoid offending those who don't embrace its meaning," writes Buddy Smith, executive assistant to the president of the AFA, on the organization's website. "Christmas has historically been very good for commerce. But now Gap wants the commerce but no Christmas."

"I interpret Gap's decision as a warning sign to Christians to get out there and tell people about Jesus Christ," writes Smith.

...
But here's the real question: Why attack Gap for not using the word "Christmas" in its advertising when in fact it does, and in a big way too?

Were I a speculating sort of person, I would speculate that it's because Donald Wildmon, his son Timmy, and the rest of the vicious inbred shit-kicking colporteurs at the American Family Association find perverting the teachings of Christ in order to extort nuisance, go-away money from corporations and terrorize contributions out of credulous hillbillies easier than, y'know, honest work.

But that would be mean.

And Mithras Claus doesn't leave libidinous liberal lasses and 20-year-old scotch under the Solstice trees of mean bloggers.