Knocking Out “The War on Xmas”

Tracy Van Slyke

In a one-two-three knock out punch, Air America's Sam Seder took down Bob Knight, the director of the Culture and Family Institute - who is continuing to hype this false "war on Christmas." As Sam points out during the interview - this is not about faith, its about fundraising. To me, this fear mongering by the religious right is actually undermining the very important Xmas spirit of love and support for all man kind. One other point - the whole assertion that we're "cleansing" the Christian "faith" from the public square is ironic - because isn't the public square supposed to be, if not cleansed of all faiths, at least open to all so no one group is put in the position to be oppressed or is given the power to dominate everyone else? Why is Christianity so special? I'm not knocking Christians or the Christian faith - I am knocking this false sense of superiority. Here's a transcript and a link to video, but is my own personal highlight from this round. SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. (CNN HOST) PHILLIPS: Is it a war on Christmas, a war Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands? SEDER: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I'd like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda. PHILLIPS: I don't think that exists. Bob? Help me out here. SEDER: We have intelligence, we have intelligence. PHILLIPS: You have intel. Where exactly does your intel come from? SEDER: Well, we have tortured an elf and it's actually how we got the same information from Al Libbi. It's exactly the same way the Bush administration got this info about the operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam.

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Tracy Van Slyke, a former publisher of In These Times, is the project director for The Media Consortium.
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