Holiday Paranoia from the Anti-God Politically Correct Far Left: Must be Christmas Season!

Posted on SuppressedNews.com 12/27/04

Just Say Merry Christmas
By Gary Palmer

Perhaps nothing exposes the gap between secular liberals and conservative Christians as much as Christmas. It may also help explain why the Democrat Party, which has been taken over by a small, but powerful cadre of secular liberals, is slipping into political oblivion.

Even though practically the whole country is adorned with Christmas decorations, all across America secular liberals are doing all that they can to suppress the public acknowledgment of Christmas. In Pasco County Florida, officials ordered all Christmas trees taken down. In a Seattle suburb in Bellevue, Washington, an atheist couple is demanding that the city remove a decorated tree even though it is not called a "Christmas tree" because they find it offensive.

In other places around the nation the secular thought police have been keeping a list and checking it twice to make sure that little children in our public schools check their faith at the school door. For instance, in Plano, Texas local school officials caught a 3rd grader handing out candy canes with a politically incorrect message attached explaining its historical religious symbolism.

Last year in Portland, Oregon, a teacher caught little Justin Cortez, a kindergartener, red-handed with Christmas cards that had "Jesus" on them. The teacher confiscated the contraband cards and handed them over to the principle who sent them to the proper authorities, otherwise known as the superintendent.

And up north in West Bend, Wisconsin, the school district announced that students could not distribute any religious Christmas cards. Down south, when residents of Mustang, Oklahoma found out that the local elementary school had expelled Christian symbols from its Christmas program voters got even by voting down an $11 million bond issue that would have funded the construction of a new elementary school.

As you can see from these stories, anti-Christmas bigotry is being imposed from the Left Coast to the East Coast, from the North to all the way down to the South.

Even though 80 percent of Americans say they are Christians, liberals continue to exhibit a total inability to articulate a message that connects with the faith of most Americans. When liberals attempt to speak about religion and faith, it usually comes across as insincere and more liberal spin promoting their own social or cultural agenda even when they are talking about Christmas.

For instance, Al Gore's 1997 Christmas message smacked of class envy and political manipulation when he said, "Two thousand years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child." A couple of years later Hillary Clinton also described Christmas as the day Christians celebrate the "birth of a homeless child."

Other liberals have described both Mary and Joseph as unemployed and homeless. The fact is, Joseph was not unemployed and they were not homeless; they were in Bethlehem because an intrusive government ordered them there for a census.

Whether it is totally justified or not, and there are millions of rank and file Democrats that have strong religious and moral values, a growing majority of voters blame the Democrats for the war against religious expression because the Party is being run by hard core liberals. These voters are part of a faith and family grassroots coalition that grows larger by the day because millions of American Christians, including a growing number of Democrats, are fed up with politically correct bureaucrats and unelected federal judges that mock their faith and trample on their rights.

If the Democrats want to change the public's perception and be a national party again, they should heed the advice of one of my favorite columnists, Peggy Noonan, and call for an end to the war against religious expression in America. Noonan points out what more and more voters have concluded that it is not "…conservatives that are scrubbing America of Christmas, they think its liberals; and they don't think it's Republicans, they think it's Democrats."

The Democratic Party should join the majority of Americans that condemn left-wing extremists who confiscate Christmas cards and candy canes from kindergartners and third graders in violation of these children's rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The leadership of the Democratic Party should also condemn such intolerance and as Ms. Noonan wrote, "…announce that the Democratic Party is on the side of those that want religion in the public square."

Democrats should learn from the Ghost of Elections Past and avoid the gloom that the Ghost of Elections Future foretells by heeding Noonan's advice and loudly affirming that the Constitution protects the freedom of religion and that there is nothing wrong with acknowledging our Judeo-Christian heritage or the Ten Commandments or Christmas. Hillary Clinton and other Democrat leaders should then stand up straight and tall, as Scrooge did, and promise to honor Christmas in their hearts all year round and then wish everyone a "Merry Christmas". It would at least be a start toward connecting with the faith and values of the people that have decided the outcome of the last two elections.

Gary Palmer is president of the Alabama Policy Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research and education organization dedicated to the preservation of free markets, limited government and strong families, which are indispensable to a prosperous society.

Read My Lips: Bogus and Irrelevant

The Wrong Argument, at the Wrong Place, at the Wrong Time
By David Horowitz and Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 7, 2005

FALSE CHARGES THAT PRESIDENTS LIED US INTO WAR are nothing new, nor are the recriminations leveled against President Bush’s Iraq war the most outrageous on record. The toxic allegation that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and deliberately allowed the Japanese to destroy the Pacific fleet to get reluctant Americans to join the war was the subject of a congressional investigation at the time, the subject of a book by America's leading historian Charles Beard (President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War) and wild accusations by Clare Boothe Luce and others. Recent scholars like John Toland and Robert Stinnett have repeated the charges. Today, these are generally regard as fringe accusations just as the left's present mania will seem as such when future generations look back on the conspiracy-theorist opponents of the war for freedom in Iraq.

Naturally, the evidence weighs against the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, but even if it were true would it change one iota the way Americans feel having gone to war against the fascist Axis? Americans would not demand we apologize to Emperor Hirohito, nor question the way we imposed constitutional democracy on the Axis powers after a prolonged (and bloody) military conflict and years of occupation.

Democracies are reluctant to go to war in the first place. In April 1941, when Hitler had already conquered all of continental Europe, a Gallup poll showed that 70% of the American public wanted to stay out of the war. It took a Pearl Harbor to change their minds. Whether this was a Roosevelt plot to deceive and manipulate that change does not affect one iota the moral issue of whether we should have opposed the Axis powers or not. The rationale for the war, the excuse for getting America into the war, is irrelevant in the face of what we know World War II was about.

So why is the nation focusing now on a bogus argument about the rationale for the war in Iraq? There is not a shred of evidence Bush in any way manipulated or falsified intelligence, yet leftists demand investigations in order to breathe new life into conspiracy theories whose only effect can be to encourage our enemies and sap our nation's will to fight. Even if Sen. Pat Roberts’ Senate Intelligence Committee should uncover information that the president had manipulated intelligence in order to convince the American people to topple Saddam Hussein, that would not affect the question of whether the war we are in is one we should be fighting.

Yet there is no basis for expecting that any such evidence would be found. If anything, the Bush Administration has understated the world intelligence community’s evidence on Iraq’s WMD program. CIA Director George Tenet – a Clinton appointee held over by Bush – called the case that Saddam had WMDs a “slam dunk.” The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which Tenet produced in 2002, contained such dire predictions as:

Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program. Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. Iraq was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle, a UAV, probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents. And all key aspects, research and development and production, of Iraq’s offensive biological weapons program are active, and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.

That kind of unequivocal intelligence is difficult to overstate. In fact, all the world’s intelligence agencies -- including those of Russia and Jordan -- agreed Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons, had accelerated his nuclear weapons program, and posed a gathering threat to regional stability. Much of our previous intelligence had underestimated other nations’ nuclear capacity: Soviet Russia, China, Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Iraq itself prior to Operation Desert Storm. Ba’athist Iraq’s significant ties to terrorism – including al-Qaeda affiliates – are a matter of record. That, coupled with the fact that we had no human intelligence gathering in Iraq after President Clinton allowed Saddam to kick the UN inspectors out of the country in 1998, stoked the president’s sense of urgency. He decided to take out a threat, instead of indulging the Left’s prescription: Leave the jihadists an irresistible target of 200,000 U.S. soldiers, standing on Iraq’s border while Saddam parades hapless inspectors through an endless maze of Potemkin villages, gets the UN sanctions removed, then begins his WMD program in earnest.

The Democrats know nothing will be found. In fact, previous studies – including Phase One of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb report – have cleared the president of pressuring agents to produce intelligence bolstering the case for war. Four solid reports have absolved Tony Blair of manipulating UK intelligence ex post facto, the same charge the Democrats now want to hang on President Bush. The leftists’ thirst for inquests and tribunals is a last ditch desperation effort to validate their fevered fantasies while besmirching in a partisan manner the integrity of the president of the United States through the Big Lie technique: keep repeating the allegation, and eventually, it will stick. (See the most recent heading under “Wilson, Joe.”)

And yet, even if the investigation were to find Bush guilty, the war for democracy in Iraq, the war to deny the terrorists a nation-state base in Iraq would continue, and that is only issue that really matters.

Operation Iraqi Freedom was never about existing stockpiles of WMDs: the 2002 Congressional Resolution Authorizing Force Against Iraq – brought up for a Congressional vote at the insistence of leftist Democrats and voted into law by a majority of Democrats – has 23 "whereas" clauses. Only two identify stockpiles of WMDs as a cause of the war. Twelve refer to violations of UN resolutions and the 1991 Gulf War truce.

The human rights conditions in Iraq are one way to measure the Iraq War. The brutal repression of the Iraqi people has come to an end. Torture squads have been disbanded, and rape rooms have been shuttered. Ethnic exploitation has been curtailed, as Iraq’s diverse ethnicities agreed to forge a common identity under a common government – led by a Kurd.

The orgy of freedom the world witnessed last January is another. Elated Muslims danced with glee through the streets of a nation that has seldom experienced genuine elections from its roots in ancient Babylon. Although Zarqawi declared war on the election and democracy as such, although he warned that every Muslim who voted was by that act an "infidel" and would be hunted down and killed, 58 percent of all Iraqis risked their lives to vote.They voted for democracy and against terror. They voted for the war policy of George Bush.

The recent vote for an Iraqi constitution -- the most democratic in the history of the Islamic world, included nearly 70% of the population. It embraced Sunnis as well as Shi'ites and Kurds. A new nation is being forged out of the ruins of the Saddam oppression. A war is being fought between terrorist Islam and an America-supported anti-terrorist Islam. And the Bush opposition in this country is either AWOL on this contest or supporting the other side.

The way to evaluate the war in Iraq is not by asking irrelevant and destructive questions about Colin Powell's UN speech. It is by asking questions this: Is the cause of Islamic jihad advanced or set back by the creation of an Iraqi democracy -- an anti-terrorist Iraqi democracy -- in the Middle East?

If Americans ignore the Democrats and this country maintains its resolve to stand by Iraq’s nascent democracy, history will remember President Bush’s contribution to the war against Islamofascism in the same way it remembers FDR's role in defeating the fascists in World War II. And history will remember Reid, Schumer, and their cohorts as it remembers FDR’s conspiracymongers who sabotage an earlier American war for freedom, and failed.

Has Katrina Swept President Bush Away?

It is inconceivable to me how a natural disaster could spark a virtual orgy in a political movement, but that seems to be precisely the effect of Hurricane Katrina on liberals.

Ever since President Bush took office, liberals have been rooting from one thing to another in a frenzied quest to find that one issue, one tragedy, one scandal that would bring him down. The list is too long to recite here.

Bush's critics treat each of these issues, in turn, as the final straw that will break the back of this abominable presidency. Everything is blown out of proportion, every possible ambiguity is resolved in President Bush's disfavor, and every possible malevolent motive is attributed to him. The most innocuous of events is treated as scandalous. Hyperbole rules. Panic prevails. Fantastic conspiracy theories triumph. Sober, balanced analysis is absent.

You would think the liberal cabal would have thoroughly discredited itself with its incessant crying of "wolf," but with mainstream media megaphones always at their back, they march on.

But is there no limit to their reservoir of indignation? Does everything have to be a 10-rated calamity (on a scale of 10)? Have they no ability to discriminate, to distinguish between the minor and the serious? The real and the contrived?

With the unfolding of any event that carries the remotest chance of damaging President Bush, they wail in unison, decrying this miserable, corrupt, "selected" president.

But with Katrina I smell an even greater blood lust in the air, even more so than with our failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq, and much more than Abu Ghraib or Gitmo. They seem to believe Katrina offers real promise for finally exacting justice on President Bush, the paragon of conservative insensitivity, the poster boy for anti-intellectualism and hero of the uncultured.

There has been a new spring in their step since the New Orleans levees broke and they realized they could blame any tardiness in the federal response on racism. As but one example, I refer you to "Meet the Press," Sunday, Sept. 25, where Tim Russert interviewed three New York Times columnists, Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and David Brooks.

Listening to Friedman and Dowd you would assume Katrina had ushered in some profound revelation about President Bush that had caused a sea change in the way we should view him from this point forward.

Whatever you may have believed about him before -- assuming you were among the credulous class who thought he might have redeeming qualities -- you must now concede that he's a louse. Only the incorrigibly dense fail to realize his presidency is over.

He's the lamest of lame ducks who will only be allowed to serve out his remaining term because -- unfortunately -- we don't have a British-style parliamentary system under which we could dispatch him immediately with a vote of "No confidence."

It's as if they are saying, "Finally, the faux legitimacy President Bush has enjoyed since 9/11 has ended. The masquerade is over. The jig is up. Everyone can see now that he's the boob we've saying he is, not the mature, crisis-managing executive he's been pretending to be."

Friedman said, "Well, I believe 9/11 truly distorted our politics, Tim, and it gave the president and his advisers an opening to take a far hard right agenda, I believe, on taxes and other social issues, from 9/10, that was not going anywhere from 9/10, and drove it into a 9/12 world. It put the wind at his back. And Katrina brought that to an end. It put the wind in his face." Friedman then suggested that President Bush's only salvation would be through a "fundamental recasting of his position and his administration." (Translation: He must act like a good liberal.)

I wouldn't cite Friedman if his position were not representative of that being expressed by many liberal commentators and Democrat politicians, who are behaving as if Democrats have just won a major election. Either they're deluding themselves or trying to fool the public into believing a national disaster has serendipitously vindicated their entire worldview. If anything, the opposite is true. While Katrina (and Rita) has put an additional financial strain on government, it hasn't laid a glove on the conservative blueprint for our nation's problems.

Despite their premature celebrating, President Bush is not likely to be buried or deterred by all the anticipatory obituaries from his leftist critics, who have grossly underestimated him before. Katrina notwithstanding, he has a spate of unfinished, conservative agenda items to pursue (and, if we're lucky, a number of liberal ones to scrap). On the bright side for the Bush-haters, they still have more than three years to bask in their rage.

Posted by David Limbaugh at September 26, 2005 07:33 PM