Notes from the War on Christmas

Think Progress has the video of Sam Seder's appearance today on CNN, where he obliterated the right-winger peddling his stage-managed about "the war on Christmas." Seder gave this argument exactly the level of intellectual respect it deserved; he made fun of it, relentlessly, with several grains of truth in the ribbing. When faced with such fake outrage, such fabricated victimhood, such making up of issues out of whole cloth, I'd say a healthy dose of ridicule is the best defense. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

PHILLIPS: Is it a war on Christmas, a war Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands?

SEDER: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I'd like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda.

PHILLIPS: I don't think that exists. Bob? Help me out here.

SEDER: We have intelligence, we have intelligence.

PHILLIPS: You have intel. Where exactly does your intel come from?

SEDER: Well, we have tortured an elf and it's actually how we got the same information from Al Libbi. It's exactly the same way the Bush administration got this info about the operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam [...]

SEDER: I do agree with Bob. I think what should happen is companies should calculate how much money they're getting from people who are celebrating Christmas and provide exactly that much amount of Merry Christmas, because that is exactly how I would want any type of religious holiday to be celebrated [...]

SEDER: Hannukah is not a high holiday. Our high holidays are Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur, which I'm sure Bob has been protesting why there are not more Yom Kippur sales or Rosh Hashanah sales during those holidays. Why shouldn't there be, right Bob?

KNIGHT: If that was associated with that holiday, then maybe I would join you. But it never has been.

SEDER: Bob, have you ever protested Martin Luther King Day not being celebrated. Do you resent when people don't say "Happy Martin Luther King Day" a month out in advance?

And so on. Actually, the parts where Seder confronts this Bob Knight guy (not the basketball coach) are even better, because it's so easy to make a mockery of what he's saying. Go watch the video.

A million years ago (OK, 11 years ago), I worked on a student film with Sam Seder. He was the lead, brought in from Boston, and I was a bit player who was friends with the director and basically doing her a favor.

He was consistently hilarious then, and also a great guy to talk to. He came back to campus a couple times, but eventually I totally lost touch with him, which I put up there in my overflowing "Chronicle of Stupid Moments."

The great thing about this is that Air America hosts are starting to penetrate television as talking heads. Humor is a great way to blunt the self-righteous indignation and victimhood the talking heads on the right consistently provide. We need more of Seder, Rhodes, Franken, Big Ed (I know he's not technically part of the AAR family, but he's on my progressive talk station) on these cable news spots. It proves that "liberal radio," which was smugly deemed a failure years before it actually hit the air, has arrived and has currency.

I also think that the winger was genuinely surprised to find a smart, well-informed liberal as his opponent who prepared for the topic and had rebuttal arguments. I know, it's shocking to find a Democratic talking head that actually DOES this. Seder's experience on Air America has made him a lot better on shows like this, and the Democrats could learn from his appearance that you can actually strategize about what you're going to say BEFORE you get to the studio.