Politics of fear

by Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, December 28, 2005

At year’s end, here’s a question worth pondering. Self-styled conservative Republicans dominate Washington. They currently control the White House and both houses of Congress. With the Samuel Alito nomination pending, they’ve got a good chance of turning the U. S. Supreme Court into a veritable right-wing star chamber. So how come they and their media enablers are acting like such soreheads and crybabies lately ? Witness the so-called war on Christmas. This imaginary struggle was largely dreamed-up by FOX News personalities Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson. The subtitle of Gibson’s book gives the game away : “How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.” For “conservatives” of Gibson’s ilk, the word “liberal” now means approximately what “Jew Communist” once meant to the Ku Klux Klan. But hold that thought. I was too busy posing disobedient basset hounds for their Santa Claus photo shoot to actually read the fool thing. But as near as I could tell, the most insidious “liberal” weapon against Christmas consists of substituting godless slogans like “Happy holidays” for “Merry Christmas.”