That Holiday Spirit

Robert Bork, the "conservative" activist judge found too crazy to sit on the Supreme Court--a Court that today manages to include Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia--has endorsed Mitt Romney, the candidate who advertises his faith but refuses to talk about it. And the candidate is apparently proud of this endorsement. Go figure. The War over Christmas reached a new low when ten rabid Christians attacked a small group of Jews who wished them a Happy Hanukkah. "Oh Hanukkah--that's the day the Jews killed Jesus," one of them said. (Of course there are two things wrong with this statement--it was the Romans who executed Jesus and they did it on Passover. However) Fortunately a Muslim who apparently had not recently brushed up on his stereotypes joined in to help the Jews fend off the Christians until one of the victims could summon the authorities. What on earth was wrong with him? Doesn't he know that he was supposed to be out calling for the death of a teacher whose class named a teddy bear "Mohammad"? Jeez, people, get with the program, will you? Of course it should have been ten secular humanists who beat up a couple of Sunday-school students for wishing them a Merry Christmas, till a Creationist--no, that's right, an Intelligent Design proponent--came by and converted them all to Bill O'Riley fans. Or something like that. The no-fact zone pays off with a vengeance.

And we learn from the lawyer of one of the attackers that it was really all right after all--his client's mother was Jewish, which means, I guess, that it was okay for him to attack a Jew for wishing him a Happy Hanukkah. Or something of that sort. I'm not sure I get it, to be honest. And anyway Hanukkah is over this year. Time to move on, I guess.

It turns out that, according to a federal judge, White House visitor logs are public documents, something that you would think would go without saying, but apparently still has to be said. It looks like The Decider was trying to claim them as his own personal property or something. This is part of his brilliant "mushroom" strategy--keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit. And speaking of fertilizer what are we to make of Douglas Feith's recent claim that "A strategic alliance of the ousted Baathists and foreign jihadists was something that our intelligence community did not anticipate"? Who didn't anticipate it? Everybody anticipated it, except apparently The Decider and his neo-con advisers. If you're going to rewrite history, at least do it plausibly. This isn't 1984 and a lot of us still have access to the unrevised version of events, regardless of how much material goes down the oubliette.

Where the hell is Eddie Lawrence when we need him? Who else could put some perspective on this situation? Ring out the old, ring in the new--new what? New worries? As the old philosopher said--or maybe it was the bird Fred quoting Abraham Lincoln--"Will you shut up?"