Capacity for Shame Non-Existent

This is a small point, but Bill O'Reilly, who spends November 1-December 25 every year filling air time on his show fighting the War on Christmas, had a section in Parade Magazine this weekend called the Great American Holiday Quiz.

It's different, though, because Parade paid him money to use the term "holidays," whereas...

Deep Thinkers

Just to add to my assessment of the pervasive influence of know-nothing Dominionism on the right, here's Daniel Henninger, a columnist paid money by the Wall Street Journal, a working writer for a newspaper with an economic focus, blaming the financial crisis on greeters who don't say "Merry Christmas" at shopping malls:

This year we celebrate the desacralized "holidays" amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin -- fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man's theory: A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.

One had better explain that.

Yes, one had.

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.

Got that, secular progressives? Deregulation, predatory lending and corporate greed had nothing to do with this. It's you and your atheist friends who are promoting anarchy and the destruction of morals. If there were only crosses on top of Wall Street skyscrapers, the investment bankers and hedge fund managers inside wouldn't have given in to the temptation of greed. Your 401 (k) might have been saved if you practiced Lent this year.

Thanks a lot, heathens. Good luck heating your home with those Bibles you like to burn.

Christmastime For The Jews

Merry Merry And All That

Unfortunately, we veteran soldiers in the War On Christmas weren't able to stop it from coming this year. We'll have to rethink our 2008 strategy, perhaps a guerrilla strategy predicated on hiding behind bushes and screaming "Happy Holidays!" at unsuspecting shoppers.

At any rate, while we brood, enjoy your Virginia Baked Ham or whatever it is you "Christmas" people eat (I'll be having a Tofurkey). Posting will be light tomorrow, but the rest of the week I have something special planned.