Culture Warrior (10 page)

But liberal [S-P] Christianity is very, very different. Liberal Christianity sees God as essentially beneficent, as wanting to help people.

         

So what Lakoff is embracing is an S-P God putting forth the standard S-P doctrine of no judgments on most human behavior. Since the Gospels have Jesus [God] in the judgment business (and Him alone—remember the “cast the first stone” passage), the S-P movement must move away from the traditional view of Jesus. Thus, the less said, the better about anything to do with Him. So there you have the genesis (sorry) of the Christmas controversy.

Now, admittedly, this is heady stuff. I have thought long and hard about it. But it makes no sense to attack one of the most cherished traditions in America, Christmas, without a powerful ulterior motive. And Lakoff provides one. A God of judgment is not helpful to the secular-progressive cause; that is for certain.

Nothing if not pragmatic, the S-P brain trust knows a complicated explanation of liberal theology would be impossible for most Americans to even listen to, much less accept. So, using the diversity ruse, they have first attacked Christmas as being “divisive.” How many times have you heard S-Ps say that the words “Merry Christmas” are offensive to many people? Well, that's another falsehood. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, only 3 percent of Americans say they are offended by hearing or seeing the words “Merry Christmas.” And since we can assume that 3 percent of any population is certifiable—there is absolutely no problem in the United States with respect to “Merry Christmas.” (By the way, pollsters always warn that the margin of error in a typical poll is also 3 percent or a similar number. Meaning, maybe everyone likes Christmas except the S-P leadership and a few media fanatics.)

It is hard to believe, but some CEOs of major retailers bought into the secular nonsense about Christmas and so they had to be educated. And they were. At the beginning of the 2005 Christmas season, outfits like Wal-Mart, Sears/Kmart, Costco, and Kohl's were hesitant to use the words “Merry Christmas” in their advertising. A few weeks later, however,
The Factor
's reportage combined with a concentrated public outcry had convinced all of them that the greeting was appropriate and welcoming—and that, in fact, ignoring it was bad for business.

And so the great battle for Christmas 2005 was won by traditional forces, but not before there was a Battle of the Bulge–like offensive launched by the secular media. A charge that, as we will see, was ferocious in its intensity.

                  

                  

The No Spin truth is that I have never had a good relationship with the print press or even with many of my peers in the electronic media, as I noted in Chapter 2. I am cocky, outspoken, well paid, and critical of the mainstream American media in general. Over the years, only a few writers, like
TV Guide
's Mark Lasswell and newspaper columnists Liz Smith, Cindy Adams, and Denis Hamill, have been complimentary of my work. The rest of the print press generally despises the overall “O'Reilly Factor” concept and, with a few exceptions, loathes me personally.

I…don't…care.

In fact, I loathe many of them right back, which, I admit, is immature. I sincerely feel that many of these newspaper people are jealous, mean-spirited, petty, and cowardly. For those reasons, I rarely speak to any of them. It took years, but I finally wised up: The print press is not looking out for me and never will be. Collectively speaking, they'd be happy if I got run over by a train.

Which, figuratively speaking, did happen in the war-on-Christmas controversy; the media came after me with a vengeance that reached ludicrous proportions. More than thirty separate newspapers attacked me by name for defending Christmas traditions. Not one media person that I'm aware of mentioned my name in a positive way. Not even Bill Moyers.

The plan of attack in the press was to charge that I “fabricated” the Christmas controversy to “get ratings.” Yeah, that's the ticket. Never mind that lawsuits were flying and that a number of stores had eradicated any mention of Christmas in their advertising displays. No, according to the press, I made up the entire deal (and the evidence be damned). S-P sympathizer Sam Donaldson put it this way on the ABC News Sunday-morning show: “There's no war on Christmas. There's a Bill O'Reilly attempt [to get ratings]. Bill O'Reilly wants ratings. He wants to stroke the yahoos—where is Mencken when we need him—in his audience by saying there is a war on Christmas.”

Somehow Donaldson missed the lawsuit against the city of Palm Beach, Florida, which allowed a menorah display but banished the Nativity scene. Palm Beach lost this one in court, and the city's taxpayers were out hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. (By the way, Sam's reference to H. L. Mencken concerned a short book he wrote called
Christmas Story.
It's satirical but doesn't diss the concept of Christmas, just those who would spoil it with hypocrisy.)

While reading Mencken, Donaldson apparently also missed lawsuits filed by the ACLU against Christmas symbols in Rhode Island and Louisiana. The ACLU lost both times. But Sam wasn't the only one ignoring the evidence. My pal David Letterman, in addition to not liking my stance on Cindy Sheehan, didn't like my Christmas take either, as he made plain in our TV chat: “I don't think this [Christmas litigation] is an actual threat. I think it's something that happened here and there, and so people like you are trying to make us think it's a threat.”

With guys like Donaldson and Letterman failing to see reality, the hard-core S-P shock troops become even bolder. Take, for example, Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who actually removed the words “Merry Christmas” from a display at City Hall. After a huge outcry, Hickenlooper backed down, but, believe me, he didn't want to. There are scores of other examples that make the Christmas-controversy deniers look foolish.

In addition to Letterman and Donaldson, Jon Stewart weighed in, addressing my concerns on
The Daily Show:
“Bill O'Reilly thinks there's a war on Christmas…If Bill O'Reilly needs to feel persecuted, here's my Kwanzaa gift to Bill O'Reilly: Make me your enemy. I, Jon Stewart, hate Christmas.”

Stewart was joking (sort of), but the message was clear: O'Reilly's a buffoon. Don't believe him.

But the TV guys were absolutely gentle in the criticisms of me compared to the newspapers. They went
wild
!

The
New York Times
ran three separate opinion pieces calling me all kinds of names and pretty much assigning me to hell (again, figuratively; S-Ps don't really believe in hell, although they might make an exception in my case).
Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof went completely off the rails, implying I was another Mullah Omar: “Perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to religious hypocrites because I've spent a chunk of time abroad watching Muslim versions of Mr. O'Reilly—demagogic table-thumpers who exploit public religiosity as a cynical ploy to gain attention and money.”

Kristof then went on to compare me to Father Coughlin, the far-right radical radio priest in the Depression, and communist blacklist-era scourge Senator Joseph McCarthy. I assume he was saving Hitler and Stalin for a follow-up column. By the way, in an interesting aside, a few months after his initial attacks on me, which included a rant that I didn't care enough about the Darfur atrocities in the Sudan, Kristoff was put in a delicate situation. The
New York Times
accepted close to a million dollars to run advertisements from Sudanese interests. Wow! What about Darfur, Nick, what say you about those ads? Mullah Omar would like to know.

Kristof, the S-P culture warrior, refused to comment. In fact, ol' Nick never did agree to debate me. Instead, he went on the Bill Maher program and leveled some cheap shots my way. That's a common S-P tactic: avoid face-to-face encounters, snipe from afar.

Anyway, back to the good tidings about Christmas. Kristof's coworker at the
Times,
Adam Cohen, no relation to the aforementioned Randy, took up a different theme: “The Christmas that Mr. O'Reilly and his allies are promoting—one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward non-believers—fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.”

Of course, that is absolute rubbish. Cohen just made it up. As I have made abundantly clear on my programs, I have no interest in forcing religion on retailers, Christian prayer in public schools, or any other kind of “theocratic” display. Like his namesake Randy, Adam Cohen is a rank propagandist, and he's not alone.

About a hundred miles down I-95,
Philadelphia Inquirer
columnist writer Jeff Gelles also distorted a few things: “I address [my comments] to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly: Please quit claiming there's a war on Christmas and threatening to boycott businesses just because some tell customers ‘Happy Holidays' instead of ‘Merry Christmas.' ”

Of course, as you probably know, there was no boycott threat. Gelles picked that misinformation up from Joel Stein, writing erroneously in the
Los Angeles Times:
“In fact, [John] Gibson and fellow Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly are so upset that they have organized a boycott of Target, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and Costco for using the words ‘Happy Holidays' in their ads….”

Two days later, the
Los Angeles Times
issued this correction (which apparently Jeff Gelles missed): “A Dec. 6 column by Joel Stein said that Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson had ‘organized a boycott' of stores…they have not called for a boycott.”

But the Christmas hits just kept on coming:

The
Philadelphia Inquirer,
apparently crazed by the Christmas controversy, editorialized this way: “Now O'Reilly gripes that the commercializers aren't exploiting Jesus' name aggressively enough to sell Obsession and Xbox 360.”

Associated Press writer Frazier Moore, a committed S-P trooper, chimed in: “O'Reilly is the sort of guy for whom the expression ‘stuff it' was invented, eh Santa?”

Hard-core left-wing editorial writer Cynthia Tucker had a very interesting take in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
“The oddest thing about this cultural imbroglio is the insistence by some Christian purists that stores—palaces of consumerism—should observe the season with declarations of ‘Merry Christmas.' ”

That's right, Cynthia, it would be nice if the American stores that prohibit the words “Merry Christmas” would stop doing that. After all, most people are buying
Christmas
gifts, madam, so it's not at all “odd” to respect the public holiday that generates the gift-giving, especially in a place that is profiting from it.

For the record, there are many misguided journalists in America, but Cynthia Tucker may top the list. Her giveaway expression “Christian purists” is about as condescending as it gets.

But the height of the print-press nuttiness was reached in the
Washington Post.
In a column rhapsodizing about Irving Berlin, Harold Meyerson rallied the S-P forces with this final paragraph: “Now the Fox News demagogues want to impose a more sectarian Christmas on us, supplanting the distinctly American holiday we have celebrated lo [lo?] these three score years with a holiday that divides us along religious lines. Bill O'Reilly can blaspheme all he wants but, like millions of my countrymen, I take attacks on Irving Berlin's America personally. If O'Reilly doesn't like it here, why doesn't he go back to where he came from?”

Lo, Harold, that would be Levittown.

Attacks on Irving Berlin's America? Easy on the eggnog, Bud—I am an Irving fan. He wrote the song “White Christmas” when he could have called it “White Holiday.” (He also wrote “God Bless America,” when he could have called it “We Like America.”) Irving Berlin seems to be a Christmas kind of guy. Meyerson seems to be, well, a bit unhinged.

After a while, this semicoherent nonsense got boring as the list of newspaper people decrying my reporting on Christmas went on and on and on; the media lemmings were jumping off the secular cliff in astounding numbers.

But at the same time that these S-P newspaper zombies were imputing false motives to me feverishly at their computers, some curious things were happening in the real world. On the fifth day of Christmas, pollsters were polling and Congress was voting.

On that day, December 20, 2005, while scores of press people were denying any Christmas controversy even existed, a CNN/
USA Today
/Gallup Poll was released. The CNN.com article went this way:

         

69% [of those polled] said they prefer “Merry Christmas” over “happy holidays,” which garnered 29%.

Compared with the 2004 Christmas [or do I mean holiday?] season, the number of people who said they use “happy holidays” had dropped 12%, from 41% to 29%.