“Economists say a combination of natural and man-made disasters led to unexpectedly weak U.S. retail sales in the crucial two months before Christmas.”

– Voice of America, yesterday.

CNBC, another state-run media agency, blames Sandy, Newtown, and the “fiscal cliff,” also without ever mentioning the O-word.

Unexpectedly!

But I’m not sure what the problem is — from 2007 through 2009, Mr. Obama and other “Progressives” told American consumers that they must begin to consume less (including several at NBC).

Isn’t this all good news, then?

Related: Now playing at the kabuki theater…

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Mark Steyn in the London Spectator on that most American of songs, Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas:”

In the end, ‘White Christmas’ isn’t a song about snow. They had white Christmases in Temun, Siberia, where Berlin was born, but a white Russian Christmas wouldn’t be the same: It’s not about the weather, it’s about home. In 1942, those GIs out in the Pacific understood that. Twelve years later, building a new movie named for the song, Berlin acknowledged the men who made it special, in the best staging in the picture: Bing singing in the rubble, accompanied only by Danny Kaye’s musical box, as the boys rest their chins on their rifle butts and think of home. Berlin couldn’t have predicted Pearl Harbor, but there’s no surprise that, once it had happened, his were the sentiments the country turned to.

Christmas was not kind to Irving Berlin. At 5 o’clock on the morning of Christmas Day 1928, his 31/2-week-old son, Irving Junior, was found dead in his bassinet. ‘I’m sure,’ his daughter Mary Ellin told me a few years back, ‘it was what we would now call “crib death”.’

Does that cast ‘White Christmas’ in a different light? The plangent melancholy the GIs heard in the tune, the unsettling chromatic phrase, the eerie harmonic darkening under the words ‘where children listen’; it’s not too fanciful to suggest the singer’s dreaming of children no longer around to listen. When the girls grew up and left home, Irving Berlin, symbol of the American Christmas, gave up celebrating it. ‘We both hated Christmas,’ Mrs Berlin said later. ‘We only did it for you children.’

To take a baby on Christmas morning mocks the very meaning of the day. And to take Irving Berlin’s seems an even crueller jest — to reward his uncanny ability to articulate the sentiments of his countrymen by depriving him of the possibility of sharing them.

Berlin was a professional Tin Pan Alleyman, but his story, his Christmas is there in the music. 23 years after his death, he embodies all the possibilities of America: his family arrived at Ellis Island as poor and foreign and disadvantaged as you can be, and yet he wove himself into the very fabric of the nation. His life and his art are part of the definition of America. Whatever his doubts about God, Berlin kept faith with his adopted land — and that faith is what millions heard 70 years ago in ‘White Christmas’.

Pour yourself an eggnog and read the whole thing.

And some various and sundry Christmas-related items we’ve linked to over the years. First up, Chris Muir’s Day by Day:

From Hot Air‘s boss emeritus:

Neo-Neocon: “Twas the bloggers’ night before Christmas.”

Orrin Judd has lots of Christmas-related posts. Just keep scrolling.

From Reason TV via Instapundit, it’s Christmas, TSA-style! (Shudder.)

From Claire Berlinski at Ricochet, Happy Jewish Christmas!

And from Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades, some parting words (at least for now) from a Mister L. van Pelt:

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Joe Carter of the Catholic Education Resource Center explores “The Fountainhead of Bedford Falls.” As he writes, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and Frank Capra’s George Bailey aren’t often discussed in the same breath, but the two fictitious characters, immortalized by Hollywood via Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, two legendary mid-century leading men, have a surprising amount in common.

“To anyone familiar with both works, it would seem the two characters could not be more different, ” Carter notes. “Unexpected similarities emerge, however, when one considers that Roark and Bailey are variations on a common archetype that has captured the American imagination for decades:”

Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s book, is an idealistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision by conforming to the needs and demands of the community. In contrast, George Bailey, the hero of Capra’s film, is an idealistic young would-be architect who struggles in obscurity because he has chosen to conform to the needs and demands of the community rather than fulfill his artistic and personal vision. Howard Roark is essentially what George Bailey might have become had he left for college rather than stayed in his hometown of Bedford Falls.

Rand portrays Roark as a demigod-like hero who refuses to subordinate his self-centered ego to the demands of the community society. Capra, in stark contrast, portrays Bailey as an amiable but flawed man who becomes a hero precisely because he chooses to subordinate his self-centered ego for the greater good of the community.

Read the whole thing, found via Kathy Shaidle, who has her own thoughts on the comparison.

And for my video interview with Jennifer Burns, the historian and author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, in which we discuss The Fountainhead, along with other aspects of Rand in postwar America, just click here.

Incidentally, say what you will about Rand and Capra, Roark and Bailey, and Cooper and Stewart; the Hollywood of World War II and its immediate aftermath was undoubtedly made of sterner stuff than its current iteration.

Related: Since this is a movie-related post, I might as well hang this here: a movie Easter egg so cool, it goes to 11.

(Originally posted December 9, 2010.)

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers! When you’re done here, check out The View from Alexandria, which has some thoughts on “Politics without Foundations,” and why one Yale history professor believes that “there’s no liberal Ayn Rand.”

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In 1882, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is Dead.” (In 18 years later, God reciprocated in-kind.) In the 1930s and ’40s, National Socialist Germany very much concurred with Nietzsche’s assessment. Or as author Dave Shiflett quipped a decade ago in National Review, “A shocking story has been revealed: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian after all. Instead, he hoped to destroy Christianity.”

In 2012′s transnational socialist Germany? They’re not afraid to declare that God isn’t dead — but can’t quite make up their mind as to His gender:

A minister in Angela Merkel’s government has sparked a pre-Christmas row among Germany’s ruling parties by suggesting God be referred to with the neutral article “das” instead of the masculine “der”.

Family Minister Kristina Schroeder made the comments when asked in an interview with German weekly Die Zeit how she explained to her young daughter the use of the masculine form for God.

“The article is not important,” she responded, adding that it was fine to use “das” instead of the traditional “der” when referring to God.

The remarks were immediately denounced by members of Schroeder’s own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

“This intellectualized nonsense leaves me speechless,” Christine Haderthauer, Bavarian social minister, told top-selling daily Bild.

Well, yes. I’d make the usual Simpsons-inspired quip that  “Wow, the  Bundestag turned into a group of dowager hairy-legged Berkeley radical feminists so slowly, I hardly even noticed,” but as Allan Bloom brilliantly noted over a quarter a century in The Closing of the American Mind, it’s much more accurate to say that the reverse has long been true:

This popularization of German philosophy in the United States is of peculiar interest to me because I have watched it occur during my own intellectual lifetime, and I feel a little like someone who knew Napoleon when he was six. I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier; Herbert Marcuse’s accent has been turned into a Middle Western twang; the echt Deutsch label has been replaced by a Made in America label; and the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.

Of course, some religions remain remarkably consistent in their belief systems. 75 years ago, George Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England….The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.”

That song remains very much the same.

Related: Via Instapundit, the Original War on Christmas: “卐mas Caroling: The Extremes Hitler Wanted to Go To in Order to Replace Christianity with the “Religion” of National Socialism.” 

That was also the topic of this heavily illustrated 2009 London Daily Mail article: “How Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas.”

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How did we come to this point? In his latest Bleat, James Lileks has a photo of Beeswax “Lip S***” balm for sale at his local mall, about which he writes in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

I don’t care that they make it. I don’t care if the store puts it in the corner, like Spencer Gifts used to segregate the “adult” stuff back with the Cheryl Tiegs bikini posters and mugs shaped like a pair of breasts. I don’t care that it exists. It would be foolish nowadays to expect it didn’t.

Just don’t shove “Sh**” in my face at the checkout counter at Christmas time, OK?

However elegant your handbags, however lovely your locally produced jewelry, however tasteful your selection of plaques with life-embracing quotes, you’re just paving the way for the day you stand before a store window looking at Yukon Cornelius having an orgy with Rudolph in the manger, thinking, “My, how did we come to this point?”

The Mayans had it wrong. The old world doesn’t end all at once: It just dies a little bit every day.

As I’ve written before, one of my local malls in San Jose is Santana Row (named after a longstanding nearby park, not the aging psychedelic guitarist), which is a mixed-use open-air project designed to look like a European street at the dawn of the 20th century. There are shops and restaurants on the ground floor, and three or four stories of condos above them. It’s sort of a retail version of Disney World — or perhaps The Village from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series.

No, that’s not fair — the staff running the asylum in McGoohan’s cult 1967 TV series were much more urbane and civilized, as a pair of examples from 2012 highlight. First up, a photo of the storefront window of Lululemon Athletica, a self-described purveyor of “yoga clothes and running accessories for sweaty workouts.” Their Website’s About Us page proudly boasts that “Quality is at the heart of everything we do, from the technical features we (sometimes literally) weave into our products, to the people we work with and relationships we build.” Just as long as you don’t mind the occasional implied F-word in their storefront windows:

I’d make a reference to a parent being asked, “Daddy, what does WTF mean?” (According to Lululemon Athletica’s Facebook page, it’s a reference to a line of clothing there called “What the Fluff.”) But Blue State demographic decline makes that increasingly unlikely. And whatever you do, don’t mention the D-word!

Speaking of decadence, further down the street at Santana Row, there’s the local branch of the  Ted Baker,  a British-based clothing chain, with this animated chap in the window:

(I had difficulty pulling video off my cellphone camera, so I grabbed someone else’s clip off YouTube instead. I’m not sure if this video was taken at Santana Row; it could very well be at another of their shops which features a bumping and/or grinding snowman in “festive” red thong underwear.)

But hey, these are just examples from Deep Blue redoubts such as San Jose and Minneapolis. Things are much more civilized elsewhere, right?

Perhaps not, according to this AP report, which notes, “Judge: La. woman can flip finger in holiday lights”:

A federal judge says a Louisiana woman has the right to display holiday lights on her roof in the form of an extended middle finger.

Sarah Childs sued Denham Springs, its mayor and police chief, claiming she was threatened with arrest if she didn’t take down the display.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana filed the suit Thursday on Childs’ behalf. Soon after, U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a temporary restraining order barring officials from interfering with the display in the city near Baton Rouge.

Childs erected the lights last month as part of a continuing dispute with her neighbors. She says she has removed them twice after one police officer told her she could be fined and another threatened to arrest her.

Santana Row features a small building whose exterior walls were imported from France. It’s an ancient former chapel that now serves as a wine bar. Which is a neat little metaphor for the state of contemporary society. We’ve kept a few details from the past, but hollowed out the culture that created them to the point of no longer being recognizable. They’re dead and buried; we’re reduced to referencing sh** and the F-word in our retail stores, converting our otherwise unused places of worship into wine bars and condos, and using Thomas Edison’s epoch-changing invention to flip the bird at our neighbors at Christmastime.

Forward.

Related: Adweek puts the spotlight on “The 20 Biggest Brand Fails of 2012 A shameful roundup of the year’s most humiliating marketing blunders.”

Update: Popular culture may wallow in the merde-filled gutter, but fortunately, in sharp contradistinction, we can always turn to the world of academia to witness a much higher standard of discourse. Or, perhaps not…

Finally, back in Europe, The Return of Das or Der Primitive.

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Yes, as always, we ask the important questions ’round here.

Dean Martin has appeared twice in recent weeks on James Lileks’ Bleat, and both occurrences represent the dueling nadirs of postwar pop culture. Back in late November, Lileks featured stills from Dean Martin’s craptacular Celebrity Roasts from the mid-1970s. As I wrote back in my link, this was the last redoubt of my parents’ idols, after the New Left conquered Hollywood at the end of the previous decade.

But the handwriting was already on the wall, even before the left had won the war.

This week, Lileks featured stills from Deano’s 1968 hour-long Christmas “Special,” and on the previous day, wrote a great set-up to how the swank postwar Rat Pack era had sunk to such a cavernous depth:

It’s quite the artifact – an intersection of the waning culture and the new Hip, Vibrant, With-It culture that was seeping into everything. It’s mesmerizing and horrible. 1968 may have been the worst year between WW2 and 2001. Judging from this short 48-minute account of attitudes, styles, musical selections, design, clothing, and general tone, you might think that the culture was utterly exhausted, so incapable of doing anything but beaming treacle into the slack faces of middle-aged men and women pasted to their La-Z-Boys, huddling indoor against the winter wind and the shrieks of the dying society, that there was no way back.

We survived. Things got better.

Well, at least for a time. (True story: I read Lileks’ post featuring Deano’s Christmas Special on my Android tablet on the treadmill at the gym while listening to Peter Gabriel’s Security album on headphones. I almost fell off the machine the moment I was struck by the cognitive dissonance of those two never-the-Fairlight-shall-meet cultures colliding inside my cranium.)

Sociologists are still sifting through the evidence of how the collapse of postwar pop culture occurred after the death of JFK, but here’s one possible timeline that explains Dean’s central role. In 1964, Dean presented the nascent Rolling Stones to an American culture that was still digesting what it thought about the well-scrubbed, suit and tie wearing Beatles. The Stones, spurred on by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, were at the height of their anti-Beatle phase, inspiring such lines as ”Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” and “The Beatles just wanted to hold your hand — the Rolling Stones wanted to rape and pillage your town.”

But the music industry quickly went all-in supporting the Beatles, Stones and similar groups. Shortly after the Beatles’ American debut, as Mark Steyn has written, Dean’s contemporary Nat “King” Cole saw the handwriting on the wall — or more precisely heard it; not through the grapevine, but through his telephone receiver. He “called up his record company, whose coffers he had enriched for many years, and hung up in disgust when the receptionist answered: ‘Capitol Records, home of the Beatles.’”

Clearly, Martin saw the future as well — and was not happy:

The haunting fear of what was to come lies all over Dean’s 1968 Christmas Special. The fulcrum that ties that show with his mid-seventies Roasts was 1970′s Airport, in which Deano played the pilot of the film’s Boeing 707, which was nearly blown out of the air by an angry bomber. Which means that Dean also inspired the seventies’ run of disaster films, featuring Earthquakes, Towering Infernos, sinking Poseidons, and an omnipresent Shelly Winters. These films would be fueled by (and would add fire to) the notion that America was in serious decline during that awful decade of Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab Oil Embargo, Iranian Hostage Crisis and polyester.

All of which forces us to reach our conclusion about Martin, and contemplating it is not an easy statement to make about a beloved cultural icon. But  considering the amount of damage the man unwittingly inflicted upon the culture, isn’t obvious that the real Manchurian Candidate wasn’t Laurence Harvey, but the enemy agent who spent years infiltrating the Rat Pack, and eventually passing himself off as Sinatra’s closet friend, before wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting nation?

Too much, you might ask? Well, consider this: I haven’t even mentioned Jerry Lewis until now.

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“President Obama cast himself in the role of Santa Claus during a visit to a toy factory Friday, suggesting that Republican lawmakers should get only a lump of coal in their stockings if they don’t work with him this month to extend tax cuts for the middle class,” his elves supporters at the L.A. Times report today.

But of course. 20 years ago, O’Rourke explained “Why God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat:”

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.

Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.

Hey, somebody in the GOP could have lots of fun with Obama Claus saying that he’s going to give everyone a lump of coal…

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Great moments in politically correct enviro-lunacy from Toys R Us CEO Jerry Storch:

Toys R Us boss Jerry Storch says that online shopping is actually quite bad for the environment.

It’s hard to overstate the benefits of online shopping: No parking lot Thunderdome, no horrid Christmas music, no million-mom mosh pit for the latest forgettable toy tie-in to crawl out of Mattel’s marketing department, and with so many online retailers offering free shipping over the holidays, it’s actually cheaper to stay in your chair and turn UPS into your own personal earth-toned Santa Claus.

But there’s a downside, according to Toys R Us Chief Executive Jerry Storch, and that downside is that every time you click your mouse, a baby seal dies. “It’s very ungreen,” Storch told the Financial Times. “[People are] just so enraptured with how cool it is that they can order anything and get it brought to their home that they aren’t thinking about the carbon footprint of that.”

And neither is Toys R Us — which has an extensive online retailing presence. I’ll take Storch’s pronouncements more seriously (well, at least as seriously as I take those from Larry Storch), when he voluntarily closes his company’s Website to save Gaia.

Of course, this may not the worst aspect of PC insanity that Toys R Us finds itself embroiled in:

SWEDEN’S largest toy chain “gender neutral” after picturing boys holding baby dolls and banishing girls from the dolls pages of its Christmas catalogue.

“For several years, we have found that the gender debate has grown so strong in the Swedish market that we … have had to adjust,” Jan Nyberg, director of sales at Top Toy, franchise-holder for US toy chain Toys R Us, said.

The country’s advertising watchdog reprimanded the company for gender discrimination three years ago following complaints over outdated gender roles in the 2008 Christmas catalogue, which featured boys dressed as superheroes and girls playing princess.

A comparison between this year’s Toys R Us catalogues in Sweden and Denmark, where Top Toy is also the franchisee, showed that a boy wielding a toy machine gun in the Danish edition had been replaced by a girl in Sweden.

Elsewhere, a girl was Photoshopped out of the “Hello Kitty” page, a girl holding a baby doll was replaced by a boy, and, in sister chain BR’s catalogue, a young girl’s pink T-shirt was turned light blue.

Top Toy, Sweden’s largest toy retailer by number of stores, said it had received “training and guidance” from the Swedish advertising watchdog, which is a self-regulatory agency.

Ray Davies, call your office.

(H/T: PJTV’s Allen Barton, who has some more thoughts on the topic.)

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Everything seemingly is spinning out of control, when you see headlines such as this today: “Peace, turkey pardoned by President Obama last Thanksgiving, euthanized:”

Peace, one of two turkeys pardoned by President Obama last year, was euthanized Monday, according to an official who insisted the timing of the death — days before the Thanksgiving holiday — was not suspicious.

But still, awfully delicious.

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Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at WKRP Ed Driscoll.com.

Related: Jules Crittenden has a reassuring list of “Things To Be Thankful For In A Troubled World,” and Jennifer Rubin proffers “Ten Reasons for Conservatives to Be Thankful.”

(Originally posted November 27, 2008.)

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As spotted on YouTube by Aleister of the American Glob blog.

I’m pretty sure Linus’ prayer and his traditional (read: non-black armband) retelling of Thanksgiving history at 13 minutes into the above video is considered a hate crime today in large swatches of Berkeley and San Francisco. As with ABC’s concurrent Schoolhouse Rock series, it’s another reminder that as late as the 1970s, when this cartoon was created for the CBS network, liberalism was still compatible with traditional American history, before the excoriating arrival of Political Correctness in the following decade.

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“CNN Asks ‘How Ethical Is Your Easter Basket?’” Spotted by Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters; as James Taranto would say, file this one under “questions nobody is asking:”

Four days before the holiest time of the year for Christians, CNN.com actually asked, “How ethical is your Easter basket?”

This was the headline for the video of a CNN Newsroom segment Wednesday about child slaves being used to harvest cocoa in West Africa (video follows with fuller transcript and commentary):

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN ANCHOR: All right. So before you start buying the Easter chocolate this weekend, something you should consider, is it contributing to child slavery. Turns out that most of the world’s cocoa fields are in West Africa. Hundreds of thousands of children are forced to work in those fields. David Mattingly takes us to one of the farms in Ivory Coast.

As opposed to North Korea, a nation that one of your other news readers thought sounded swimmingly when she visited in 2010, even though child slavery — and worse — is a concern there:

Today, Kim wears dark glasses to ensure that her identity remains concealed. While she lost seven family members in the re-education camp, she currently has two sisters and a brother who are still imprisoned. She described a typical day at the camp:

“I attended indoctrination classes in the morning. In the afternoon the children were sent to push trolleys in the coal mines, often without any safety gear.

People were dying in the mines. There were numerous mine collapses, so many injuries, people who lost their legs, many who were buried alive. It was horrible.

I was treated like a slave and worse. I hardly slept. It was inhuman. But I never complained. I just followed all the rules. I had to find a way to survive.”

Kim claims that the conditions were so terrible that she thought about committing suicide “hundreds of thousands of times” during her 28-year detention. But because there was always someone watching her, this simply wasn’t an option:

“Each prisoner is assigned to watch four or five other prisoners. So if anything happens, the other prisoners would alert the guards because they didn’t want to get into trouble themselves.”

While her descriptions of executions are absolutely horrendous, nothing is more disturbing than her memories about those individuals who she saw kill their children in an effort to stave off hunger. In one instance, she recalls a mother boiling her 9-year-old daughter. In another fit of desperation, a woman killed her 16-year-old son, chopped him up and took him to a butcher to obtain some corn in exchange.

Kim admits that these details are difficult to share, but she bravely proclaims, “I want the world to see these images and to hear my testimony.” In describing the conditions in the isolated and volatile nation, she says, “I am living proof that there are no human rights in North Korea.”

Contrast those horrors with happy, shiny Riefenstahl-esque (or heck, Ted Turner-esque) tone of this CNN piece:

And of course, this is far from the first time that a representative of CNN has attempted to trash traditional American religion.

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As Clay Waters notes at Newsbusters, “NY Times Buried David Barstow’s Reluctant Pentagon Vindication on Christmas Day:”

An April 20, 2008 New York Times story by David Barstow, “MESSAGE MACHINE: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” won a Pulitzer Prize for the explosive claim that the Pentagon had cultivated “military analysts” in a “trojan horse” campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay.

On December 1 of this year, the Washington Times reported that an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general, spurred by Barstow’s reporting, found no wrongdoing, and quoted a spokesman for former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld saying the New York Times should return its Pulitzer. But the New York Times itself did not report the Pentagon’s vindication until Christmas Day, on page A20.

If that sounds like a familiar M.O., recall what John Nolte wrote the day after Christmas at Big Journalism about the Times’ colleagues in ideology at the other end of the Northeast Corridor. The Washington Post also benefited  from what John dubbed the “Christmas Dead Zone” to easily bury news:

By finally bothering to look into the kind of scandal the MSM would’ve used to bedevil George W. Bush at every turn, the Washington Post is now on record devoting 2600 words to the story.

However, what the Washington Post quite deliberately did was to drop the story on – of all days — Christmas Day, into the Media Dead Zone between between Christmas and New Year’s.

What the Washington Post deliberately did was make sure this story won’t become a part of The Narrative, a narrative that would (and should) damage Their Precious One.

Jo Moore could not be reached for comment.

(H/T: SDA)

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Posting will no doubt be sparse on Christmas day (not that I was a posting machine yesterday, of course); but in the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:

A Very Merry Christmas!

Related:

And via Hot Air:

Neo-Neocon: “Twas the bloggers’ night before Christmas.”

Orrin Judd has lots of Christmas-related posts. Just keep scrolling.

Kathy Shaidle proffers a big heaping helping of ’50s-style Christmas cheesecake.

And from Reason TV via Instapundit, it’s Christmas, TSA-style! (Shudder.)

Update: Happy Jewish Christmas!

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The sadly obligatory link to the video of the Great Indianapolis Air Jordan Stampede of 2012:

Air Jordan fever has swept the nation, as frenzied shoppers pushed their way into their local malls to get their hands on re-issued Nike Concords. We reported on Air Jordan arrests in Atlanta earlier, but perhaps the most insane footage of today’s sneaker assault comes from Indianapolis, where doors were snapped off and a full-blown stampede broke out with people actually being trampled on the way into the store.

Yet more reason to stick with Amazon at Christmastime:

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Obama goes Christmas shopping* with your money, and says to the unfortunate Best Buy clerk surrounded by multiple cameras, and a phalanx of Secret Service agents, “Let’s see if my credit card still works,” Real Clear Politics reports:

“It will be really embarrassing if it doesn’t,” remarked President Obama as he was attempting to pay for some items he bought while Christmas shopping. (at the 2:39 mark in the video [at RCP])

Obama was taking some time out of the Washington bubble and went shopping at a Best Buy store and Petsmart in Alexandria, Virginia.

That’s pretty much what 2012 is all about isn’t it? The voters will decide if we’ll keep making the payments on the anti-American Express Card of America’s self-proclaimed Fourth Greatest President:

* Say, at the risk of sounding churlish, who are the gifts for?

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Michael Graham slams It’s a Wonderful Life as “one of the most beloved holiday movies ever made. And one of the very worst:”

And, of course, Clarence is right, but how is that wonderful for George? Sure, his neighbors all bust their piggy banks to help out, but in the end George is still stuck in Bedford Falls, his friends are out their savings  . . .  and Potter still has the 8 grand! You call this “wonderful?”

You want to see a wonderful life? Forget Bedford Falls with George Bailey. Show me George Bailey without Bedford Falls.

Show me George in his New York penthouse, with that hottie Violet dressed to the nines, talking about the new dam he’s building in Central America, bringing power to an entire country. Show me his plans for a big-city skyscraper that will house thousands.

Show me the great life of George Bailey at his unfettered best, with a family safe and prosperous thanks to the wealth he’s earned making the world a better place for the most people. Now that is a wonderful life.

That was the story featured in the lesser-known remake made just a few years later starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. Killer production design and story arc, but the dialogue was more than a little sketchy at times.

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… And Drudge has plenty of fun in response:

• Obama celebrates Hanukkah at White House...
• TWO WEEKS EARLY?
• LIGHTS ALL THE CANDLES...
• 'We Never Need an Excuse For a Good Party'...

We’ve been told endlessly by the media that Obama is a “constitutional scholar.” Nobody said he was a religious scholar as well (not even Rev. Wright).

Related: “President Obama has been a regular church-goer for decades,” the L.A. Times claims, with other than the last three years of course. At the Tatler, Roger L. Simon responds:

Say what? Let’s leave aside the eye roller that with “regular” church-going Obama was still somehow able to miss the multiple racist and anti-American excrescences of his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright (or so the then candidate assured us) and cut straight to the chase – the life of our president since he has been in the White House.

From Time Magazine (Dec. 23, 2009) – No Church-Going Christmas for the First Family:

But there’s one common Christmas practice not on the First Family’s schedule: a visit to Christmas Eve church services.

Church, in fact, has been a surprisingly tough issue for the Obamas. They resigned their membership with Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in 2008 after Obama renounced the church’s controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. And while the First Family intended to find a local church to attend when they moved to Washington, concerns about crowds and displacing regular worshippers has prevented them from finding a new religious home during their first year here.

Believe what you will of the last sentence and then move on to Ben Smith in Politico, roughly a year later (Sept. 2010):

President Barack Obama, beset by substantial public doubts about his religion and right-wing suspicions that he is Muslim, took a few steps on Sunday to dispel those image problems: He and his family crossed Lafayette Park to St. John’s Episcopal Church, just the third time he has worshipped in public since he became president last year.

I don’t think Obama’s a Muslim. I don’t think he’s anything. He’s more than likely an agnostic who attends church when he has to for political expediency. America is a largely religious country, after all. He certainly is not a regular church-goer, unless three times a year constitutes regular.

Keep rockin’, fellas.

More: “How to Light the Hanukkah Menorah” at About.com and “When is Hanukkah (Chanukah) in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015?” — but then, given how the Internet is the ultimate jobs destroyer in the president’s speechwriters’ eyes, you can see how they wouldn’t want to Google for advice.

Given that Hanukkah begins on December 8th next year, could the White House have confused the dates? On Tuesday, Allahpundit listed all the presidents that Obama has channeled since 2007 and quipped, “I’m honestly curious to see how he draws the inevitable Gerald Ford analogy before his term’s up.”

That didn’t take long at all, did it?

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Or going into them:

President Barack Obama said in a speech delivered Thursday evening that Americans should ponder the words of Jesus Christ this Christmas season and make their actions conform to them.

“So long as the gifts and the parties are happening, it’s important for us to keep in mind the central message of this season, and keep Christ’s words not only in our thoughts, but also in our deeds.”

Obama was speaking on the Ellipse in front of the White House at the ceremony for the lighting of the national Christmas tree.

– CNS News, via the Weasel Zippers blog today.

But here’s a quick flashback to some very different stories from the administration’s earlier, funnier days, back before they headed for the bunker:

“Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) tells People magazine in the issue out Friday that he and his wife, Michelle, do not give Christmas or birthday presents to their two young daughters.”

– The Politico, July 24, 2008

“When former social secretaries gave a luncheon to welcome Ms. Rogers earlier this year, one participant said, she surprised them by suggesting the Obamas were planning a ‘non-religious Christmas’ — hardly a surprising idea for an administration making a special effort to reach out to other faiths.”

– The New York Times’ profile of Desirée Rogers, the former Obama White House social secretary, December 4th, 2009.

“No Churchgoing Christmas for the First Family.”

– Time magazine headline, December 23, 2009.

Of course, Al Gore would argue that components of the Vast Right-Wing Media Conspiracy such as Time, the Politico and the New York Times had it in for the president right from the start, but that’s a subject for a different post.

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