Our long national nightmare is over

Well, it's the season for Jesus Claus and Santa Christ. I am hoping to get through it without hearing too much of the yearly blather about the non-existent War on Christmas, a cousin to the shibboleth of Political Correctness that still seems to fuel the fires of conservative outrage (I suppose something has to, since things like Mike Huckabee's release of a serial rapist for political reasons and Rudy!s sex on the city raise nary a grumble on the right). Nothing ruins Christmas like Christians, of course, and over the last couple of years those of us with rational temperaments have had to endure a war on intelligence during the holiday season.

I worry no more. Bill O'Reilly has declared the war on intelligence a success. Christmas is saved from those "forces of darkness" that would allow businesses to cater to actual non-Christians during the holiday season by greeting people with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Get out of my store, you kike/raghead/atheist commie/dark person of indeterminate non-Christian religion-this is Our Time!" Or, well, whatever it was that privately-owned businesses were supposed to be forced to say to pay homage to the theocrats. Whatever. Anyway-to whom do Christians owe this overwhelming victory over the forces of almost nobody? Why, none other than-Bill O'Reilly himself! By jingo, Bill, you did it, with the strength of your hand and heart and your pure Christian spirit! Why, if it weren't for you, the overwhelmed, persecuted Christians would have had nowhere to turn, since they clearly have no power or support within our government or the media. But lucky for them, there was you, a man on a culture mission, making the world safe from licentious, amoral, sex-crazed anti-Christian liberals and their Christ-less allies. You know, when I think about it, that's probably the intersection between liberals and the terrorists. So, O'Reilly didn't really just save Christmas-he indirectly saved all of western civilizaion. That's quite a feat.

The War on the (non-existent) War on Christmas is stupid on so many levels that you could write a book about that alone and get a firmer understanding of the vapidity of the conservative Christian "movement." This, though, is a whole new level of dim. The ego of this man is stunning. The idea that America would become a Christmas-less nation (almost as though it were run by those anti-Christian heretics in Massachusetts) but for his tireless work is, well, ridiculous. For his support of this non-issue, he gives himself a public pat on the back. What I don't understand is, how can conservatives follow this nonsense? This little self-congratulatory wank inadvertently shows that his yammering about the non-existent War on Christmas was little more than cheap self-promotion. Beyond that, it has little meaning to him. You could say that about almost any subject he covers. Yet, he remains the idiot-king of the conservative talk-show world, the cubic zirconium in the Fox News tin crown. Liberals will generally eviscerate supposedly liberal pundits when they make fact-free or foolish assessments, or represent them poorly, as a quick Google search with the words "Joe Klein" will reveal. Yet, dunderheads like O'Reilly get a free pass, even though their ideology largely revolves around their wonderful selves and little else. When you're voting for a politician, you're forced to make a choice, even if it will be an imperfect one, and self-interest may be a part of the personality. That's just a part of the compromises one has to make in a democracy. But no one is forced to listen to a self-serving pudsmack like O'Reilly. That's a choice. That it's a choice conservatives make in such numbers is mightily revealing.