What happens when you try to force a marriage of the theocon and unfettered free-market impulses of the Republican Party? You get a Frankenstein-like Bill O'Reilly Wet Dream: Daniel Henniger, a deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal, argues that the War on Christmas™ has played a large part in our current economic meltdown.
This year we celebrate the desacralized "holidays" amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin -- fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man's theory: A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.
Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.
What do we learn from this column? A few things:
Whatever Rupert Murdoch touches - in this case, the Wall Street Journal - will turn in a Palinesque, slogan based piece of crap that caters to the lowest common denominator.
It is hard to distinguish between conservative publications and the Onion.
The Right has become a slow motion train wreck with the conductors hopped up on Oxycotin and unable to see just how wildly misguided and treacherous their clouded thinking and in ability to self-reflect has become.
Oh, by the way - Happy Holidays, my fellow Secular Humanists. Our master plan has succeeded. Bwahaha!
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