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Friday, December 23, 2005

In Case You Missed It

Posted by on December 23 at 10:54 AM

Salon had a wonderful piece by Christopher Hitchens this week on the War on Christmas. He’s for it. I particularly loved this graph, a take-down of Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s resident loudmouth. (I’ve been on his show a couple of times, and I always feel like I need to take a shower immediately after.) From Salon:

…I was invited onto Scarborough Country on MSNBC to debate the proposition that reindeer were an ancient symbol of Christianity and thus deserving of First Amendment protection, if not indeed of mandatory display at every mall in the land. I am told that nobody watches that show anymore—certainly I heard from almost nobody who had seen it—so I must tell you that the view taken by the host was that coniferous trees were also a symbol of Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers had endorsed this proposition. From his cue cards, he even quoted a few vaguely deistic sentences from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, neither of them remotely Christian in tone. When I pointed out the latter, and added that Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest were symbols of the winter solstice “holidays” before any birth had been registered in the greater Bethlehem area, I was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough’s increasingly desperate staff. And when I added that it wasn’t very Tiny Tim-like to invite a seasonal guest and then tell him to shut up, I was told that I was henceforth stricken from the Scarborough Rolodex. The ultimate threat: no room at the Bigmouth Inn.

CommentsRSS icon

Erm, it's Slate, not Salon. The article is at Slate. Your link is correct but your entry says Salon twice.

Whoops. Sorry about that.

So why the hell is Franklin High School "The Quakers?" Dude wasn't a Quaker. http://sln.fi.edu/franklin/birthday/faq.html#21

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