A very impressive aspect of the War on Christmas this year is the huge, thunderous barrage with which the other side opened. All at once, from all over the place, article after article appeared, announcing there was no such thing as a War against Christmas. Quite frequently these were laced with remarks of varying degrees of unpleasantness directed at those who cherish the festival.

This assertion, of course, is a willful denial of objective reality, a.k.a. a lie. The VDARE.com Christmas Competition archive, which by now has documented well over a hundred incidents over seven years, is perhaps the most efficient refutation on the internet. (Thanks, blogger SWAC Girl, for noting this.) But I saw another method the other day, looking at the Wedding Press cutting book of friends married in January 1956. Most of the cuttings were bordered by Christmas advertising. Even those who know what has been going on would be astonished by the freedom and vivacity with which Christmas was named in America in those days. (Dissidents used the euphemism …Yuletide.)

Not only is it a lie, it is also, after the first two or three examples, boring. Can there ever have been a time when so many professional writers have been able to go on auto pilot and turn in the same piece? Didn’t the editors think plagiarism?

The webzine Media Matters For America (no friend of VDARE.com’s) has performed a valuable service by documenting this (with hyperlinks). They

surveyed the newspapers in the Nexis database called “News, All (English, Full Text)” to examine how the allegations of a political attack on the Christmas holiday have been treated by editorial boards, columnists, and other commentators…

the articles were divided first by “editorial” — unsigned pieces that express the opinion of a newspaper’s editorial board and thus the official position of the paper — and “opinion pieces,” signed commentaries that include op-ed pieces and columns that appear on a newspaper’s editorial and opinion pages. We then sorted further into these two categories:

1) The author accepted the premise that there is indeed a “war” on Christmas…

2) The author dismissed the claim of a concerted attack on the Christmas holiday, disputed the existence of any major affront to Christianity, or described the entire “conflict” as generally exaggerated.

The results were 18 articles supporting the “war on Christmas” concept, and 106 rejecting it.

Unsurprisingly, the prestige media were overwhelmingly Christmas War deniers. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, etc, etc. Investors Business Daily and The Christian Science Monitor were perhaps the leading affirmers. Most of the rest were smaller papers, quite a few Canadian.

The Deniers may say there is no war, but they are certainly behaving in such a disciplined and concerted way that they appear to be fighting one. As indeed they are.

Hat Tip Vox Day, who observes

Christians and non-religious keepers of the Western cultural tradition across the nation must have been delighted to receive this powerful vote of reassurance from such an elite group of editorialists. Now we know that we can in all good conscience wish everyone a Merry Christmas without wasting a moment’s concern for the possibility of offending anyone. We can sing Christmas carols at school, throw Christmas parties at the office, and generally share the Good Tidings of the Savior’s birth with all and sundry without hesitation.

(You need a sense of humor in the trenches.)

Black…and gay. The headline is “Rapist Preys on Men in Houston Area.”

Rapist Preys on Men in Houston Area
Dec 18, 5:32 PM EST
Associated Press

By JOE STINEBAKER
Associated Press Writer
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HOUSTON (AP) — A rapist who preys on young men has struck five times in the Houston area since mid-September, and police said Monday there may be even more victims, but they are too ashamed to come forward.

The AP manages to come up with description of the rapist, “a clean-shaven black man, 18 to 21 years old, 5-foot-6 to 6 feet tall, with a shaved head,” but they don’t want to tell us what race his victims are:“The victims have all been men in their late teens.” And of course it’s not in the headline–blacks and gays are both Media Protected Classes.

If there’s one thing the Duke Rape Case shows, it’s that race is a newsworthy factor and matters to the public in cases like this.

We would all like to know if this is, or isn’t a hate crime. as it frequently is in prison rapes.Why don’t they tell us?

Despite the effusive sob story boo hooey that has typified much coverage of the recent meatpacking raids, ICE’s emphasis on the identity theft aspect has forced some consideration of that subject.

The New York Times took a business approach in one article (which interestingly never used the “I” word), correctly pointing out that financial concerns make a bundle from the refusal of government to fight identity rip-offs [Protectors, Too, Gather Profits From ID Theft, 12/12/06]

It is not just criminals who are profiting from identity theft; financial institutions are making money, too. Fear of identity theft has helped give rise to a nearly billion-dollar business in credit-monitoring services sold by the major credit bureaus — companies like Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — as well as direct marketers and banks.

The piece also featured a middle-class Kansas couple, Melody and Steven Millett, who purchased a $79.99-a-year service from Equifax that was supposed to monitor their credit activity. Nevertheless, ID thief Abundio Perez used Steve’s Social Security number to apply for 26 credit cards, finance several cars and acquire a mortgage.

The difficulty of repairing a ruined identity and credit rating is daunting — some victims may never recover their good name, like Dublin, California, resident Audra Schmierer (pictured here). Her Social Security number was stolen and used by more than 200 illegal aliens, leaving her with a tax liability of over $1 million.

The Greeley Tribune, source of much teary-eyed propaganda about illegal aliens being repatriated (getting a free ride home for Christmas would be another view), published a thoughtful piece by victim of ID theft Theresa Myers. She tried stenuously to repair the damage to her credit, but could get no government agency to cooperate in fixing her problem [As victim of identity theft, I wish several things would happen, 12/17/06].

The bottom line is, I never saw any permanent resolution to the case. For all I know, my Social Security number and name are still being used by someone.

The larger bottom line is that honest citizens are road kill for the businesses and government institutions that care little for traditional American standards of law and fairness, particularly when there are billions of dollars to be made off illegal aliens.

Metaphor alert! Pythons aren’t native to the Everglades, or at least, they used to be not native to the Everglades, but owners who find their pet pythons growing too large have been releasing them into the wild, with predictable results.

If the pythons proliferate enough, Miami will look like one of those Third World countries that Indiana Jones is always visiting.

It’s a fascinating wildlife story, but there’s a metaphor there, I suspect. Biologists don’t think of this as migration, by the way, they use the term “invasive species.”

Biologists Hunt Invasive Pythons in Fla. -

By TODD LEWAN, The Associated Press
Dec 17, 2006 1:22 PM (1 day ago)

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. - “SNAKE!” Hearing this shout, Skip Snow slammed on the brakes. When the off-roader plowed to a halt, he and his partner, Lori Oberhofer, leaped out and took off running toward two snakes, actually - a pair of 10-foot Burmese pythons lying on a levee, sunning themselves.
….

“It’s a now-or-never thing,” Oberhofer says. “We still have a chance, with the python’s numbers being so limited, to do something. But if we let this go, we don’t know how far the pythons will migrate, how much they will reproduce.”
….

Since 2000, slightly more than 1 million pythons have been imported by the United States for commercial sale; nearly half are shipped to Miami, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says.