Irony of the Day

Bill O'Reilly and other conservatives are in a lather about liberals trying to Grinch their favorite holiday--you know, the one celebrating Mammon...er, I mean the birth of baby Jesus.

Now it's Dennis Hastert, firmly resolving to re-name the Capital Holiday Tree the Capital Christmas Tree.

Personally, though I'm a practitioner of the only faith it's legal to discriminate against in the US (namely, atheism), I feel a bit of distaste for PC euphemisms for Xmas trees, just as I feel distaste for all euphemisms and their political uses. So, you go Denny with your executive decision.

But can someone explain to me the furor over "holiday tree" vs. "Christmas tree"? I mean, a "Christmas tree" has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH XMAS after all. It's a Yule tradition, a remnant of a pagan practice adopted by Christians after they killed off or converted all those pesky folk who didn't see things the same way. In fact, the Puritans our right wing routinely hold up as the true founders of America condemned the heathen practice of chopping down an evergreen and hauling it into the house for holiday ornamentation.

It's ironic that members of the largest religious group in the world, with unprecedented financial and global reach, are claiming discrimination at all, let alone over something so trebly ironic. "Uh, we wanna make sure that this symbol we adopted from a tradition whose practitioners we oppressed and wiped out by burning them at the stake is not deprived of its uh traditional association with our faith in an effort to do to us what we did to them..."

"The speaker believes a Christmas tree is a Christmas tree, and it is as simple as that," said Ron Bonjean, spokesman for the Illinois Republican.

It's nice that Mr. Hastert believes thusly, but trees were chopped, brought home and decorated by the Egyptians, Romans, and Celts long before Mary's womb was impregnated by God's breath moving over her private waters. I doubt the first Christians were decorating conifers in the fucking desert, shit-for-brains! The practice was actually condemned before Christ's birth by the Prophet Jeremiah in Chapter Ten of his book, but since old J.'s not condeming gays or pushing the death penalty in that chapter, no chucklehead Christer is liable to pull out his dictumanary and try 'n read that part.


I think Darwin's Theory of Evolution should be renamed The Christmas Theory of Evolution. Then the right would fight for its inclusion in every classroom.