Links for 2011-12-22

  • Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass Ä°Ëâ¬" Whatever

    But -- but -- what about all those horrible atheists taking over holiday displays with crucified Santa skeletons? Surely that's evidence of a war! Well, no, it's evidence of some non-believers taking a page out of the PETA playbook, i.e., being dicks to get attention and to make a point. I do strongly suspect that if we didn't have some certain excitable conservatives playing The War on Christmas card when a business says "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas," and such, there would be less incentive for certain excitable non-believers to make a public show of desecrating Christmas symbols, but that's just an opinion and I don't have anything to back that up. What I do know is that the War on Christmas crusaders and the Santa crucifiers deserve each other; the rest of us, unfortunately, have to watch them both make public asses of themselves.

  • I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you - Satire - Salon.com

    In the annals of history, only Orwell, Voltaire and maybe a half-dozen other guys could match's Hitch ideological bravery and breadth of political knowledge. In 1977, after I'd returned to his graces by aiding him in a plot to assassinate Henry Kissinger's character, Hitch and I visited Borges' library in Buenos Aires. At the time, Hitch was working for the KGB while pretending to work for the BBC, and I was working for the Mossad while pretending to work for Burger King. But our many identities were merely covers for our lives as political writers at low-paying magazines. Borges invited Hitch and me into his home, fed us tea and empanadas, and launched into a seamlessly brilliant discourse on surrealism in Latin American history. He talked for 30 minutes without stopping, during which time Hitch smoked six-dozen cigarettes. When Borges finished, Hitchens paused, spat in his ashcan, and said, "Of course, you know, you're wrong about everything."

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Here's an amusing exchange between Bill O'Reilly and a guest on his show about this mythical war on Christmas at department stores: O'REILLY: See, I think you're, I think you're crazy. And here's why. I think the backlash against stores that don't say "Merry Christmas" is enormous because now…
When Richard Dawkins and Bill O'Reilly are on the same side of an issue, it's a surprise. When it's an issue that involves religion in the public sphere, it's quite possibly a sign that the apocalypse is drawing nigh. Nevertheless, that seems to be the case at the moment. Bill O'Reilly's views…
Kevin Drum has a post up at the Washington Monthly about the new meme going around to the effect that saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is some sort of anti-Christian conspiracy. I wrote about it a few days ago with Pat Buchanan's inane blustering about it. He quotes a religious…
These religious conservatives are certifiably nuts. Rep. Henry Brown of South Carolina and 74 Republican co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives actually wants Congress to pass a resolution condemning people for saying "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas." Seriously? Yeah,…

This is the first time I've ever been tempted to link to someone else's links, for this line: "What I do know is that the War on Christmas crusaders and the Santa crucifiers deserve each other; the rest of us, unfortunately, have to watch them both make public asses of themselves." Amen. Or whatever I'm supposed to say.