Transcending Christmas, Pt. 2: Who Owns Christmas - Rick Perry, Tony Perkins or... FOX News?

Christmas trees have become big news

 this season if only because the 

"war on Christmas is heating up.

And FOX News is leading the charge.

Because, only FOX News can determine who should celebrate Christmas. That's right. FOX News OWNS Christmas. Or at least it thinks it does. For example: the controversy about Rhode Island's Capitol "Holiday Tree" was kept alive recently by FOX attack reporter, Jesse Waters. Waters accosted Gov. Lincoln Chafee, asking him why the tree was called a "Holiday Tree" instead of a Christmas tree. Chafee was not quite as ruffled as Waters wanted him to be when he sited the state's religious dissident founder by saying:

“We’re trying to uphold the values of Roger Williams and make sure that the purity of theology is kept free from the pollution of government.”

Needless to say, Waters didn't get it and kept hounding the governor, asking "What holiday are you celebrating?" 

FOX also owns Christmas with egregious books like The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought by John Gibson. (Gibson is the host of FOX's "The Big Story.")

Simply put, by featuring the "war" on Christmas so frequently and consistently, FOX wants to show us who REALLY owns Christmas.

SOLE PROPRIETOR?

Of course, plenty of other entities claim ownership of Christmas, not the least of which is the Family Research Council of the (now ubiquitous) conservative political convention, the Values Voters Summit. As we all know, the grand high exalted mystic ruler of the FRC, Tony Perkins, wastes no time in his views on who owns Christmas. It not only belongs to people who tell you where it should be celebrated, but to people who bloviate on where it shouldn't be celebrated:

Imagine celebrating the holidays at a graveyard--or the sight of a mass execution. That's what the Harris County Democratic Party's doing by holding their Christmas party at an abortion clinic. And not just any clinic, but Planned Parenthood's Houston mega-center. When reporters broke the news, the city's liberal mayor, Annise Parker, tried to defend the idea by saying, "It's not about the building; it's about people's lives." She's absolutely right. This is about lives--specifically, the millions taken in abortion clinics like this one! Even moderates like Andrew Breitbart said, "One doesn't have to be a dedicated pro-life activist to find the idea of this event kind of sick." After all, Christmas is a celebration of birth-not death. We rejoice in the baby who came so that we might have life-and life more abundantly.*

Last year, we wrote an article on Tony Perkins' "Christmas Card" to donors/followers of the FRC (Stranger Than Fiction: Tony Perkins' Christmas Card") in which he politicizes Christmas, albeit over-texted with Scripture. No doubt about it: TonyPerkins and the FRC have a serious stake in Christmas.


Rick Perry Is Not "Strong", But He Owns Christmas Too


Rick Perry's ad "Strong" earned him a record-breaking 665,000 "dislikes" on YouTube not only because he  slammed gays in the military and the absence of prayer in public schools, but he stated that kids "can't celebrate Christmas" in schools.** The ad instantly gave way to a dozen parodies (see the most stinging one below - "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm an a**hole"). The bombastic attack on the Obama administration chose to hang on to Christmas as demonstration of ownership. 

So it seems that any "war" on Christmas, any inclusive attempts with "Holiday Trees" and "Happy Holidays", any celebration of Christmas in the "wrong" places declares the owners of Christmas to be the ones who insist on...control. We've noted that Christmas has, in effect, transcended itself, morphing into a universal Christmas Spirit. By controlling Christmas, these same people also attempt to control the Christmas Spirit. 


Perhaps the one person who realizes this manipulation is John Stewart of The Daily Show as the video below demonstrates. Stewart, of course, pokes fun at the whole ridiculousness of the "war", but in his comedy lies the truth: people may think they own Christmas, but the ownership of the Christmas Spirit? 


I don't think so. 

* Some rather sticky points against Perkins' rhetoric: some people actually do celebrate part of their Christmas placing wreaths or "blankets" of evergreens on loved ones graves. Secondly, Andrew Breibart is not and never has been a "moderate."

** CBS News:"Based on checking the schoolhouse scene in Iowa and Texas and consulting an array of national experts, it's clear that school officials are not permitted to organize prayers or focus on a single religion in connection with Christmas, but kids may pray and also celebrate the holiday on their own," the site's article reads.

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Dumb and Dumber...and Dumbest: FOX News Creates America's Only Journalistic Black Hole

WE ALWAYS KNEW...

"Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

A scathing report by Fairleigh Dickinson University - a PublicMind Poll - discloses the fact that not only have FOX viewers been LESS informed about national and international events than other news viewers, but  they have also have been MADE less informed than others who do not even follow the news via broadcast "journalism." It seems that in its driving force to keep people misinformed - "fairly unbalanced" - FOX has actually made its viewers dumber.

A BENEFICIAL BLACK HOLE

Of course, for most of the politicians who frequent FOX, this may not be a bad thing: "analysts" like Mike Huckabee feel safer in their niches than they would be at, say MSNBC: at FOX, they're never really questioned nor are their "analyses" really scrutinized. 

FOX's jumble of misinformation and no information has actually been beneficial to some people: while the general public suffers from current affairs blindness, pundits, politicians and religious leaders of the Right have benefited. Overly supportive attitudes and softball interviews have been the boon to the likes of Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Ann Coulter. 

To be fair, it would be unwise for these same people to court, say, Anderson Cooper or Lawrence O'Donnell. Honest analysis with hardball questions are too tough for them unless, like Ann Coulter, one has an overabundance of self-esteem and thinks that there is no such thing as bad publicity. FOX always avoids the most detrimental subjects or frames them in the manner of an attack from the other side ("why do you think you were so viciously attacked about ____by____?"). 

Jon Stewart Was Right

So, let me tell you what's going on. So, two Sundays ago, I do an interview on Chris Wallace’s show, and along with some really salient, dynamic points that I made, I mentioned Fox News viewers were the most consistently misinformed viewers in every poll. PolitiFact took issue with that, and said I really shouldn't have said every poll. Just most. So, I accepted it, I then I brought up a 21 lie salute of PolitiFact Fox fact-checking. So I assume that Chris Wallace now begins the work of apologizing for Fox's many false and misleading statements. They’ll probably do a few per show and carry us into the 2014 midterms with a clear conscience.

UPDATE:

As is usual with FOX, there has been no response as to the FD report. 

Bring Forth The Gays! Bring Forth The Jews! And.. RELEASE THE KAGAN!!

  

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
 Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
 His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
 The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
 About his shadowy sides; above him swell
 Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
 And far away into the sickly light,
 From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

 - from The Kraken, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

OK, I got the idea for the title from Jon Stewart's take on the Right's reaction to the nomination of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. Watch it below. He is, as always, spot on. Any fan of fantasy and science-fiction films is familiar with The Kraken, a mythical beast of the sea sometimes physically depicted as a giant squid. The Right takes Kagan's nomination as an  attack, directly hitting its "left" flank in the culture war.

But the Right seems confused in its counterattack: lesbian? no experience? anti-military? Harriet Miers? Intelligence? As Stewart put it: "She's a recordless entity with no paper trail."

The comparisons to Harriet Miers are, of course, ridiculous: Miers committed THE public relations suicide of the decade when she said of George Bush, "He's the most brilliant man I have ever met." So much for judgment. She also received her law degree at Pat Robertson's Regent University, so you could pretty well determine the direction of her  stances, especially concerning gay rights. Anyway, after her fifteen minutes, she was put back in her cage for two years, during which she was constantly  pressured by Johua Bolton to resign. She now works for the Dallas law firm known as Locke Lord Bissell Lamp, Liddell.  

Any comparisons come from desperate Right wingnuts or people who get their news from Fox. 

We Fear What We Don't Know

The Judicial Crisis Network is just coming out with an ad requesting that the Obama administration make every effort to make all of Kagan's records (and thoughts) from the Clinton administration public. They are obviously scared of what they don't know. That's understandable. What's not understandable is taking a "pre-emptive strike" stance by unleashing a video that calls into account her limited experience and her stance against military recruitment on college campuses. The latter is akin to a tempest in a teapot. Her knowledge of the Constitution and American law are never questioned. Neither are her presentations to the Supreme Court as Solicitor General.

The Intelligent Lesbian

The moment I saw a picture of Elena Kagan, I thought "Well, this will be interesting." Afterwards, I was struck by her impressive background and realize that Tony Perkins had a right to be afraid of her: she might become the most intelligent of the justices. Say what? An intelligent President picking an intelligent SCOTUS justice?  Horrors!! OMG! She's a shorter, stouter Rachel Maddow! What will become of us!

So with the looming passage of ENDA, the Christian Right has come forth in battle armed with the question of moral fitness: Elena Kagan is gay and she'll swing the Supreme Court towards acceptance of gay marriage and gay rights in general. It makes no difference that Kagan has already been quoted as saying she does not believe that the Constitution supports gay marriage, but the mere possibility that she might be gay makes her totally unfit in their eyes. And any position that she has taken is skewed toward the far left:

"As the Harvard Law School Dean, Elena Kagan tried to bar the military from recruiting on her law school's campus during the height of the Iraq War based on her opposition to the federal law restricting homosexuals in the military. 

"...Ms. Kagan's incredibly hostile view of the military suggests she is out of touch with mainstream sensibilities and obedience to the rule of law. President Obama promised a nominee committed to the 'rule of law,' but, instead, he appears to have nominated a hard-left activist to the Supreme Court.

Of course, Bryan Fischer of American Family Association is apoplectic:

... [They want] an activist on the bench, a crusader, and knows that a homosexual judge will tilt the playing field on behalf of the legalization and social endorsement of sexually aberrant behavior.

The day a homosexual is elevated to the bench, the end will have come for the principle of sexual normalcy, the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. That's too big a price to pay.

So left, center-left, center, center-right? Like a chess player who can't make up his mind, the Right is all around the board with Kagan. The problem the Right has is that some of their clan support Kagan's nomination: she has been sympathetic to the woes of big business. The Court might find itself in  the position of deciding regulation or deregulation of businesses like British Petroleum, so the fate of the environment can rest in Kagan's decisions.

And then there's Pat Buchanan's take on the nomination: not enough African-Americans on SCOTUS and too many Jews:

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

So there we have the Right's precise, well-informed, analysis of Elena Kagan's nomination to SCOTUS: she's a too-intelligent, military-hating, allegedly lesbian Jew who never saw the inside of a courtroom. 

Hey, that's better than Scalia, isn't it?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Release the Kagan
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Glen Beck Is Officially Crowned King Of Fools So Now We...Cry!

As I've said many times in this blog, hatred makes people stupid, so it's really no surprise that the crying pundit, Glen Beck, has been given the very dubious honor of being named "Misinformer of the Year" by Media Matters, the media watchdog. (And lest anyone think it's a strictly left wing media promoter, check out the stuff that they have on Obama!) The stupidity comes when Beck tries to pawn off his misinformation as actual truth. Look at just some of Beck's statements analyzed (and corrected) by Politifact.org and their "truth-o-meter":

Labor union president Andy Stern is "the most frequent visitor" at the White House.
Politifact: Only if you use incomplete, outdated data

Less than 10 percent of Obama's Cabinet appointees "have any experience in the private sector."
Politifact: Most of them do, to varying degrees

"In the health care bill, we're now offering insurance for dogs."

Politifact: No public option for Bo

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, "has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population."

Politifact: Holdren never endorsed these ideas

Forty-five percent of doctors "say they'll quit" if health reform passes

Politifact: A questionable assertion based on questionable data

"Why do we have automatic citizenship upon birth? We're the only country in the world that has it."

Politifact: Brazil, Canada, Guatamala, Romania...

When viewing Beck as a baffoon, one can't help but laugh at him and the people who adore him (yes, that's the right word). Mark Twain once said: "Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." The problem with Beck as I see it, is that we're laughing at the wrong person. Beck enjoys the laughter he gets from his critics. In fact, it energizes him. His ego is still growing and he loves every minute of derision. However, we should be laughing at the people who watch/listen to his shows. They should be cringing with humiliation.

So we should hoist aloft a campaign to make sure that America knows Beck's audience to have the cumulative IQ of a dead flashlight battery. We should have SNL sketches devoted to idiots watching Glen Beck. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert should devote whole segments on Glen Beck supporters with misspelled signs, interviews with illiterate Beckies across the country, and special features about how some of them are paying $500 a drop for Beck's tears (Vicks Vaporub not included).

Nah, it won't float. Why not? Because Beckies transcend humiliation: they are too stupid to even surmise that someone is laughing at them.

So what should we do with this large crowd (according to his ratings) of idiots?

The King of Fools Has Been Crowned! Long Live The King!!!

There is nothing we can do, except ... cry.