The anti-Christmas card Fox News is freaking out about now. (White House)
This story combines three of my least favorite things—Fox News, Sarah Palin and the War on Christmas—so I'm already breaking into hives just thinking about it. But here goes. Via
Mother Jones, the serious reporting of
Some Guy at Fox News:
The official White House holiday card makes no mention of the word ‘Christmas’ and instead focused on Bo the First Dog based on the wishes of the First Family. [...]
The front of the card features Bo the First Dog lounging by a fireplace. Holiday greenery is draped over the fireplace mantle. Holiday presents are placed on a table underneath a poinsettia – instead of a Christmas tree.
Los Angeles-based artist Mark Matuszak told the LA Times that he was asked to create the card by the White House social secretary.
“They wanted to do an inside shot, something home related,” Matuszak told the newspaper. He said one of the ideas was to focus on the Obama’s family dog. “So we thought, let’s put Bo in front of a fireplace.”
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told Fox News & Commentary that she found the card to be a bit unusual.
“It’s odd,” she said, wondering why the president’s Christmas card highlights his dog instead of traditions like “family, faith and freedom.”
“Even stranger than that was his first year in office when the Christmas ornaments included Chairman Mao,” Palin said. “People had to ask that it be removed because it was offensive.”
All right, we're just going to toss out that last sentence. Go look it up on Google, if you want. I'm not touching it, because revisiting that would likely result in me driving a railroad spike into one or both eyeballs, just to dull the pain. Let's talk about the rest of it.
The premise here is that, after first being too Christmas-loving, now this card is not Christmas-laden enough. To you or I it may look like Thomas Kinkade ate a box of candy canes and pooped out a tranquil interior scene, but to the forces of Christmas Outrage it is deeply suspicious because there is a dog in the scene when there should have been a Jesus, and there is a poinsettia instead of a Christmas tree, and there's just something off about it, in their minds. A suspicious number of books, perhaps, or maybe one of the chairs is facing towards Mecca. I don't know, because I am not fucking insane.
I am now going to enumerate just a few reasons why this line of attack is, indeed, quite gleefully insane. If there is ever a court hearing to decide whether Sarah Palin or Some Guy at Fox News should be committed for the safety of themselves and others, I shall submit all of this as evidence.
First: White House Christmas cards that do not feature the human inhabitants of the White House are historically commonplace. This is for a host of reasons; leaving politics out of it would be one. You can imagine what the above scene would look like if President Obama was in it: Oh my goodness! How dare the fellow politicize the season by, you know, being in his own White House Christmas card! (As that last link shows, putting politicians in holiday greeting cards is fraught with peril.)
Second: Let us examine what other major institutions deem to be appropriate cards for the season. Institutions such as, let us say, Fox News itself, the perpetrator of this newest challenge to all our sanity via ginned-up (emphasis on gin, here) seasonal outrage. The Fox News card this year shows an anthropomorphic fox (get it?) winning a sheep-driven sled race over fellow participants ABC, NBC and CBS. There are no Christmas trees: The only decoration is a bit of holiday bunting.
Now, if this does not scream "family, faith and freedom" to you, then you would presumably be correct. No doubt the inside of the card is chock full of holiday messages like "I love Jesus" and "Merry Christmas or go to hell," but I question the sincerity of Some Guy at Fox News having a well-choreographed cow over the depiction of an animal on a holiday greeting card, or of Sarah Palin wondering at the terrible unusualness of said cards, when everybody knows official Christmas cards have to have pictures of your family holding Second Amendment-sanctioned firearms while giving a group hug to the baby Jesus in a nativity scene painted by Norman Rockwell's better, more faith-oriented cousin.
Not to be outdone, the Fox Business card features two anthropomorphic foxes roasting the dead, plucked and skewered NBC peacock over an open fire. The cartoonish murder of your perceived enemies? Now that's the Christmas spirit! Or it would be, if there were any Christmas trees there either. Or families. Or faith. Or whatever.
So it would seem that, in an affirmation of everything everyone with even a pea-sized fragment of brain in their heads already knew, holiday greeting cards come in a wide variety of themes. Each year I get a wide assortment myself: Many of them feature trains, or snowy outdoor scenes, or fireplaces with bright red stockings, or just some photograph of wildlife frolicking (well, desperately trying to survive) in the winter snow. It's all very sweet, and I almost never question the faith and/or family bonds and/or commitment to America hinted at or not hinted at in those cards, by those that send them to me. Again, this is because I am not fucking insane.
Third: I don't have a third. I don't care anymore. I didn't care in the first place.
Here is what I would like the takeaway lesson to be, from this and every other War on Christmas story ever devised and presented to us as the outrage-against-Jesus-and-families-and-patriotism-of-the-week. They do not mean it themselves. They are transparently, flagrantly lying their asses off about their "concern" for all of these things. They know full well what they are saying; they know full well how ridiculous it is; they do not actually believe a word of it. The story was written because Some Guy at Fox News had to come up with some small bit of silly, stupid propaganda to make their viewers feel warm and grumpy inside. Sarah Palin was called for a quote because Sarah Palin can express feigned outrage over absolutely anything, at any time, and does not need to know even a single small shit about the subject before pronouncing her conclusion on it; the Other Guys at Fox News will run with the story, even while fingering their own animal-sporting, pro-peacock-torturing holiday cards, because that is what they do.
None of it is real; none of it is earnest. It is simply another spot of charming Orwell-poking propaganda, a fib for the sake of entertainment. It is as choreographed as a ballet, and as skillfully executed as a sixth grade reenactment of a Charlie Brown Christmas Special presented in the school gymnasium.
But it makes crabby, paranoid kooks around America feel better about themselves at night, so fine, whatever. Yes, Virginia, there is a War on Christmas. Now go to sleep already.