Pat Robertson gears up, reluctantly, for the War on Christmas

via (Right Wing Watch) Yes! It's that time of year'the time when all good Christians put up the lights, pick out a tree, and whine for a month and a half straight about how goddamn persecuted they're going to be any minute now, just you wait. Pat Robertson, take it away:

It's, well, Christmas all over again. The Grinch is trying to steal our holiday. It's been so beautiful, the nation comes together, we sing Christmas carols, we give gifts to each other, we have lighted trees, and it's just a beautiful thing. Atheists don't like our happiness, they don't want you to be happy, they want you to be miserable. They're miserable, so they want you to be miserable. So they want to steal your holiday away from you.

I've never seen Robertson look so worn down. It's like he's already conceded to those mean, non-gift-liking, non-tree-having atheists. But why? Christmas continues to be marked on the calendars. It's the same time as always. No matter how many greeting cards get produced saying "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" instead of "merry goddamn Christmas, and suck on this you pagan scum" Christmas continues to be a thing, year after year. We light up the Jesus Tree with Jesus-approved slightly-less-flammable LED light bulbs. We go see Santa at the mall, and the bright young Christian children tell him what Jesus Presents they want. We sing deeply spiritual hymns like "Jingle Bells" and "Really, Really White Christmas," and even the atheists and the pagans and even some of those Jewish folks all join in (though most of the pagans I suspect are only doing it ironically. Pagans are the hipsters of the religious world).

No, Pat doesn't seem to have his heart in this. He recognizes the danger'atheists despise all that is good and fun and brightly colored, and so go around stealing other people's holidays and turning them into, um, I'm going to say maybe history textbooks, or maybe socks or something. One minute you're having a perfectly nice Christmas, and then bam, your aunt gives you a pair of wool socks, wool effing socks, and you realize that she's gone over to the atheist side of things because any decent Christian would damn well have bought you something with a USB port.

But he doesn't seem to have the usual fight in him. Come to think of it, very few of the usual suspects have weighed in on the danger to Christmas so far. Maybe it's just because of the election, but it just seems like the War on Christmas is starting later and later each year. Heck, when I was younger we'd start the opening War on Christmas skirmishes just as soon as the kids started school each fall. You bought your new school clothes, and you bought some paper and some pencils, and you wandered around that one section in Sears that had the artificial Christmas trees for sale all the way from June into February and said, "I wish we could afford a new one of these, because our old one smells like mothballs and asbestos and old car batteries and I get dizzy every year when we take it out of the box." And then some atheist would walk by and, I don't know, punch you in the stomach or something. But now there's Amazon, and so you can buy your Chinese-made artificial tree from home without ever having to face down an atheist once. It's not the same.

What was I talking about? Ah, the War on Christmas. Yeah, I just don't think people are into it this year.