Gene Lyons on the PWOC (phony war on Christmas)

Have I mentioned in the last 10 minutes how much I like Gene Lyons' column? Well, anyway, I do.

And he really nails the "war on Christmas" nonsense for what it is: a bigoted, dishonest fantasy of rightwing fear- and hate-mongers meant to sucker those willing to be snookered.

In his column Politics of Fear Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 12/28/05, he summarizes the "war on Christmas" meme very well:

At year's end, here’s a question worth pondering. Self-styled conservative Republicans dominate Washington. They currently control the White House and both houses of Congress. With the Samuel Alito nomination pending, they've got a good chance of turning the U. S. Supreme Court into a veritable right-wing star chamber. So how come they and their media enablers are acting like such soreheads and crybabies lately ? Witness the so-called war on Christmas. This imaginary struggle was largely dreamed-up by FOX News personalities Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson. The subtitle of Gibson's book gives the game away : "How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought." For "conservatives" of Gibson’s ilk, the word "liberal" now means approximately what "Jew Communist" once meant to the Ku Klux Klan. But hold that thought. I was too busy posing disobedient basset hounds for their Santa Claus photo shoot to actually read the fool thing. But as near as I could tell, the most insidious "liberal" weapon against Christmas consists of substituting godless slogans like "Happy holidays" for "Merry Christmas."


Never mind that "holiday" derives from "Holy Day," in the same way "Christmas" does "Christ’s Mass." (Or even that the White House Christmas card read "Happy Holidays.") It's no longer enough to wish these knuckleheads health and happiness. Failure to actively acknowledge the superiority of Christianity to rival faiths is deemed blasphemy.

Never mind, for that matter, that according to the Catholic liturgical calendar that O'Reilly, the chief FOX News theologian, professes to revere, what he calls "the Christmas season" is actually Advent. What we're witnessing is the mainstreaming of paranoid persecution fantasies that used to be the provenance of fringe outfits like the John Birch Society and the Klan. (my emphasis)

I couldn't have put it better. Lyons has a habit of putting things better than most people would. Especially our collection of Big Pundits. Because he really understands what today's Christian Republican White Peoples' Party is all about. And says so.

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