Charles P. Pierce pours a nice stiff drink, then lobs a warm "f--- you" at the wingers for their craven attempt to politicize Christmas:

So it is well within the spirit of the season when I say, how dare the smug bastards attempt to wedge the season into that cramped and miserable place in which they keep their jackal-eyed ambitions? Just when you thought there was no bottom to the barrel, the usual suspects decide to use Christmas as another means by which to set Americans against each other. Conflict serves political goals, and it makes great cable television, and those are the only reasons why this whole "Christmas Under Siege" campaign erupted.

The political goal is to distract us from the fact that C-Plus Augustus and his party are embarking on a legislative agenda that would make Jacob Marley look like Dorothy Day, and the latter purposes serve only the likes of Bill O'Reilly, who's coming increasingly detached from his internal loofah, and Pat Buchanan, who has not lived a day in public life where he didn't appeal to the country's basest instincts. So we get a blizzard of dishonest anecdote and absurd posturing in the service of a lunatic masquerade that encourages one group of Americans not to trust another group of Americans, and assures them that they are simultaneously superior in their morality and utterly in peril. And why? For power and for ratings, nothing more. The people pushing this notion know it's crazy. All they have to do is look around them, for pity's sake. Yet they will coin this season for their own cheap advantage.

Remember Marley's warning: "Or would you know...the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago ... It is a ponderous chain."