The REAL War on Christmas

“Enough of that UN-mandated Socialistical ramp--here, your old crutch will be in better keeping with your home schooling...”

If you think this doesn't make any sense, join the club...

Bill O’Reilly and the Faux News crowd are in the middle of their annual War On The War Against Christmas, dredging up every incident of Happy Holiday-ism they can find in an effort to show how anti-Christmas America has become. Bill also argued that Christianity isn’t a religion, but a philosophy. Not to say that a good Catholic boy like O’Reilly has a fundamental misunderstanding of either Christmas or Christianity, let’s take his statements at face value for a moment.

As the Spirit of Christmas Present says to Scrooge (in the Alastair Sim movie but not the book), “We Spirits of Christmas do not live but one day a year, we live the entire 365.” And what is that “spirit of Christmas”? Buying gifts? Setting up Nativity scenes? Randy office parties? Santa Claus? No, the true Christmas spirit is “Peace on earth, good will towards men.” It means not going to war unless you really have to. It means giving to those less fortunate. It means going the extra mile for your fellow man. Not just in December, but all January through November as well. Above all, it means ANYTHING but paying attention to Ayn Rand.

That’s the Christian philosophy in a nutshell, Bill. And your cohorts, the Republicans in the Senate, showed just how much true Christmas spirit they had when they turned down the UN treaty on the disabled. Never mind that John McCain endorsed it, George H. W. Bush endorsed it, Bob Dole was wheeled in from his deathbed (as Jon Stewart put it) to endorse it. Never mind that it was based on OUR OWN LAWS. The Republican bloc but a handful voted it down because it raised serious concerns about our sovereignty (all treaties do–that’s part of the reason we have them), it was a socialist plot from the hated UN, it was an attack on home schooling according to Paul Ryan, the idiot we were spared from having as Vice President a few weeks ago. But above all, because Barack Obama wanted it.

Nice going, guys–maybe you’d like a chance to repeal our own disability laws now. After all, building ramps might cut into corporate profits.

Oh. And Merry Christmas.

Happy Hanukah to all our Jewish friends (as they say on the news). We will be taking our winter hiatus after our annual HOLIDAY card next week.

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We’re Back (Hopefully) And Watching the Bill-Barry Sparring Match

Lilliputian Attack Dogs

Well, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I took off Martin Luther King Day weekend and the following weekend because I was going to be doing Artist Alley at Setsucon in State College PA, but I was also in the middle of finishing a manga parody that I wanted to have printed so I could sell it at Katsucon down here at Washington Harbor in February. Now, if you’ve ever done a publication, you KNOW that in the last week or so you’re doing nothing else but finishing things you forgot you hadn’t finished or had left for the end and FINDING PROBLEMS with the pages you thought you were already done with before you commit the whole damn thing to posterity. So, I’m running on 3 hours of sleep every night and get the mess to Ka-Blam in time to pack for Setsucon, when (ahem) KA-BLAM! another attack of whatever stomach ailment laid me up in December threw me onto a bed of pain for the day I was supposed to drive up to State College. Although the con lasted two days, it wouldn’t make much sense to drive up the next day since I’d get there in time for maybe 2 hours before I had to close the table for the day, so I sadly cancelled my plans.

BUT THE GOOD NEWS–BLECCH! Part One, will be on sale at Katsucon (manga and anime lovers can probably guess which manga/anime is the main focus of my parody 😀 ) Along with my book of reprints from my Bush era cartoons: BUSHWHACKED–The Wurst of HAIL DUBYUS! For those who aren’t going to be at Katsucon, you can get both of these at IndyPlanett, or rather BUSHWHACKED now and BLECCH! when it is finished printing.

However, it looks as if I have a LOT of catching up to do. Tea party representatives coming to free us from socialist government health care at the same time as demanding their socialist government health care. A state of the union address with Republican/Democratic mixed seating (oh, the shame! what will their parents say!). Keith Olbermann–quitting or fired? An uprising in Tunisia and *drumroll* another one in EGYPT! We’re really caught between a pillow and a mattress there–on the one hand, we have our favorite Middle Eastern dictator, the only person the US has been able to trust near not-so-shrinking violet Israel for the past 30 years, and on the other, a populist democratic uprising against the tyranny he’s unleashed against his own people. Wow, smothered with kindness–do we back the devil or the deep blue sea?

As much as we want to plant democracy in the rest of the world to make the world safe for democracy, we’ve discovered that unless we’re sitting in a country with an army of 100,000 or so, elections don’t always go the way we’d like them to. The “soon to be canonized in honor of his 100th birthday” Ronald Reagan found that out in South America where people actually voted in governments that were interested in people instead of profits–so he ignored the elections and sent in the CIA to provide money and other care packages to right wing goon squads to protect American commercial interests. More recently, we found that out in Palestine and Lebanon. And right now, Fox News is creaming in their jeans about the possibility of The Islamic Brotherhood–their current bugaboo version of the Si-Fan–turning Egypt into an anti-American/anti-Israel haven, delaying the apocalypse for a few more weeks. Or bringing it forward. Or something. In any case, as always on Fox News, it’s Obama’s fault.

With that in mind, and trying to start out to slowly figure out where the world is after my illness and publication cramola, I turned to Bill O’Reilly’s interview with our President before the that icon to American excess, the SuperBowl. Barry grants an interview to whatever network is hosting the game, so this year was Fox’s turn, so they sent over the only potty-trained member of their attack dog squad to perform the interrogation. Bill O started off by playing nice and thanking Obama for helping to get Fox News’s reporters out of perilous peril in Egypt and Obama replied that that was his job. Then the gloves came off. O’Reilly came in with, not fair but tough questions, but questions worded and designed to tempt Obama into pique or anger, for example, when O’Reilly called the Health Care package by the politically loaded monicker Obamacare. This maneuvering didn’t do O’Reilly much good against the King of Cool. Trying to bait Obama by practically being insulting to his face–at several points, O’Reilly literally tried to shut Barry up by cutting him off (I thought he was going to yell at his engineers, “I’ve had it with this pinhead, shut off his mike.”)–but the President kept it together and brought things back to what he was saying like a patient parent faced with a child who hadn’t taken his Ritalin. For Several Days.

Big O almost lost control of his narrative at one point. Explaining that he was faced with a disaster in the first two years of office, he described those years AS a disaster. One can imagine what the RW blogosphere is doing with that one! But beyond that, Bill never managed to nudge him into a shouting match, despite trying to play gotcha on health care, on the fact that people HATE YOU (They don’t hate me, Bill, they hate a funhouse mirror image of me–a nice way to describe the workings of Roger Ailes’ pet network). Finally, Bill got to the SuperBowl and asked who Obama wanted to win–of course, since the Chicago Bears weren’t playing, Obama really couldn’t care less, but he phrased it nicer. “AH-HAH!” cried O’Reilly, “you don’t care who wins the SUPERBOWL?” Finally he had it on record, Obama saying the most un-American thing short of “Jesus Christ’s mom made lousy apple pie.” Could he really be Kenyan? But Barry brought it back and said that there were two great teams and he wanted to see a great game. Offered to let Bill come and watch with him. But Bill said no, “I wouldn’t want to spoil anyone’s fun,” as he thought:

“The way you just spoiled mine.”

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I guess we’re lucky Eric Massa didn’t try to tickle Rahm Emanuel

Glenn Beck gets a vision of Eric Massa trying to retaliate against Rahm Emanuel by tickling him to death

We TOLD Glenn Beck not to look!

Poor Glenn Beck! He was sure he was onto the key to the downfall of Obama’s socialist fascism. Rush Limbaugh told him not to do it. Bill O’Reilly told him not to do it. Michelle Malkin told him not to do it. But…he did it. He booked Eric Massa.

Eric Massa had been loudly proclaiming that he was being forced out of office because he was the key vote for dooming health care. Salivate, Glenn, Salivate! What did they do to you? What kind of pressure did they put on you? Well, I have non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. NEVER MIND THAT–the WHITE House–what did they do? OK, there were these sexual harassment allegations. AH-HAH! And those weren’t true at all? Well, of course, I groped a few people. Guy people. I mean, who doesn’t when you’ve had a few?

Ummmmm…

And then there were the tickle fights. Nothing sexual at all there. How can you say that’s sexual harassment?

Ummmmm…

I’ve been fighting these charges all my life. What we need to do is campaign reform! Stop calling each other names like socialist, fascist! You can be a progressive and a fiscal conservative at the same time! What we don’t need are these teabaggers pretending the deficit didn’t happen until Barack Obama took office.

Ummmmm…

Don’t worry Glenn, you didn’t waste our time. THAT night. Now try not wasting it every OTHER night!

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Palin’s Pick, Preferred by Pawlenty, in Potsdam and Plattsburgh, got Plainly and Powerfully Pwned

Sarah Palin is offered THE BOX--press the button and a million dollars in publicity, but a conservative has to lose an election--PRESS PRESS PRESS PRESS PRESS

Also starring Doug Hoffman and Frank Langella

This is going to grab me no readers–after all, the results of this past Tuesday’s election are already wrapping yesterday’s fish. Which is odd, considering the runup which made it seem like it was the most important election after the last election (as Jon Stewart noted). Yesterday we had 24 hours of “Was this a referendum on Obama?” or “Was it just local politics?” Myself, I think it was a little bit of the former and a LOT of the latter. But That is NUANCE. And Cable TV News doesn’t do nuance. Leaving aside Faux News as a propaganda machine, the other two 25/8 news networks wouldn’t know nuance if it grabbed a mallet from hammerspace and hit them over the head. I mean, when Wolf Blitzer accidentally got a confession from Balloon Boy, someone had to whisper it in his earpiece before he even noticed what he’d tripped over. And over on MSNBC, Chris Matthews’ idea of a debate resembles more a college wrestling match than any intellectual exchange–2 out of 3 throws. But I shouldn’t take them to task–even the newspapers don’t do nuance any more–and they wonder why they’re being run out of business by the Internets.
Anyhow, to return to Tuesday’s election, pretty much everything happened the way it could really be expected–no matter how much anyone hoped otherwise. But the fun race of the day was Congressional District 23 of New York. District 23 has gone Republican for the last 2000 years, and this year it promised no difference. IF it hadn’t been for the teabaggers who decided that the Republican candidate, Dierdre Scozzafava, was a closet lefty, planning to bring socialism down on the heads of her constituents. After all, she supported abortion rights and gay marriage, the next thing you know, she would be demanding the re-distribution of wealth. So they sent in their ringer, Doug Hoffman. Hoffman, who had to be told where the 23rd District was, had no idea what its issues might be–he was being sent in to defend the country from Kenyan aliens masquerading as Hawaiians. Soon Sarah Palin descended upon the 23rd District, tho’ invited by none. Along with Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, they supported the hell out of Dougie.
Now you know the deer in the headlights look. Imagine that deer suddenly noticing a 16-wheeler coming hellbent down the highway at 85 mph and you’ll have a good idea of how Doug Hoffman started to look. I mean seriously, I’ve never seen a candidate with a more shell-shocked expression on his face–if he opened his eyes any wider, they would have exploded from the pressure differential. Because of or in spite of Sarah’s help, he started taking Scozzafava’s voter base and Scozzafava dropped out–instructing her supporters to vote for the DEMOCRAT, Bill Owens, who was at least playing fair. Despite that clue, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and the rest, all fell over themselves predicting a landslide for the carpetbagger. The entire MSM called it the most important race of all time because it would show how much support Obama had lost and how important the teabaggers had become.
Then Dougie lost. The 23rd went Democrat for the first time in two millenia and … everyone switched gears and started discussing NJ and VA and THAT became the referendum on Obama. And by Monday, no one will even remember if we had the most important off-off year election of the century last Tuesday.
Have a good weekend folks 🙂

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Which way is the wind blowing today, Mr. President?

The townhall meetings are likened to the climax of Frankenstein where the mob of villagers burn the monster alive in the windmill, whose vanes form a burning cross.

A recent town hall meeting

Well, the anti-Obama mobs have continued disrupting the town meetings that the Republicans demanded so they could break them up with anti-Obama mobs. These guys are getting scary. One yahoo brought a loaded gun to a townhall meeting where the President of the United States was speaking, just in case he had the chance to shoot someone (see Armed and Dangerous?). He was carrying a sign reading, “It’s time to water the Tree of Liberty”–making a reference to a Jefferson quotation that continues, “with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” The police did not arrest him. He was on private property and the weapon wasn’t concealed so–he was breaking no laws. I guess there’s no law against an implied threat to the President in New Hampshire. I mean, come on, would you ever carry a loaded gun anywhere unless you think you might have to use it, right? Oh, heck, I might need to shoot a lock open next to the President of the United States, whom I think is really a Kenyan usurper, and a secret Moslem who wants to turn us into Socialists! Yes, I agree, that the idiot has the right to say whatever comes into his pointy little head, but the combination of advocating spilling the blood of tyrants while standing in a group of angry protestors WHILE carrying a loaded gun shows the sorry state of political discourse going on today. Some people (not mentioning any names, Republican party) seem to think that it’s OK to drown out someone trying to speak by shouting–probably because they see Bill O’Reilly do it on a nightly basis. Didn’t their mothers ever teach them how to be polite?
But their message is getting through to the Great Compromiser, who sent up a trial balloon to see if he could get away without a public option in the ever-dwindling Health Care Reform. This time, it was Kathy Sebelius who was chosen to take the bullet. The reaction from the left very pointedly showed that without the public option, the Democratic party can expect its progressive wing to sit on its hands come November 2010–and possibly 2012 as well. After all, without the public option, we might as well pass a bill apologizing to the Health Insurance conglomerates for needlessly worrying them about real reform. It’s truly amazing how many times someone in this Administration–which spends so much care crafting its messages–how many times someone “misspeaks”. BTW that has got to be the god-damnedest word in the English language, covering everything from Freudian slips to trial balloons to outright lies, trying to make it sound like missing the step on a short flight of stairs. I think it’s high time we replaced that term.
Anyway, Kathy Sebelius has officially misspoke and President Obama has re-iterated his support of the public option. But don’t try to get end-of-life counseling–that’s already in the crapper.

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