Joy to the World - or Else

One constant teabagger refrain is that government is too big, too intrusive and too all-encompassing. So one California teabagger naturally wants to require schools to play Christmas carols and students to listen.

Yes, the annual War on Christmas and the teabagger movement have come together in Redding, California. Merry Hyatt, president of the Redding Tea Party Patriots, is so incensed by her local public school not bombarding kids with holiday tunes that she's starting a ballot initiative signature campaign to fix this. If the initiative passes, schools would be forced to play carols - even overtly religious ones - and those who refuse would be dragged into court.

Hyatt, who as a substitute teacher really should know better, said she launched the initiative to push a specifically religious means of getting students to clean up their act: "He's the prince of peace; he's the only one who can get these kids to stop being so violent." She is unapologetic about her intentions, saying, "Bottom line is Christmas is about Christmas. That's why we have it. It's not about winter solstice or Kwanzaa. It's like, 'wow you guys, it's called Christmas for a reason.'"

She seems to be missing the point about a few things - such as that not everyone celebrates Christmas, and that not everyone who does celebrate it does it the way she does. Somehow, I doubt that Jews or other non-Christians would appreciate being forced to listen to Christmas music. And oh yes, there's a little thing called separation of church and state. Blaring such specifically Christian music as "Angels We Have Heard on High" or "Joy to the World" in a public school most definitely counts as advocating religion. Even if the initiative passes - and that's a big if - it would last about four seconds before being struck down as unconstitutional.

And for a supposedly get-government-off-our-backs teabagger, Hyatt apparently doesn't realize that her initiative would put government in charge of forcing religious beliefs on people. Anyone who has ever studied the history of governmental religious doctrine knows that it always ends badly. People who follow the "wrong" religions - or even the "wrong" form of the "right" religion - always end up being discriminated against or worse.

Of course, she seems to have no problem with forcing her own beliefs on people. She is saved and pure while everyone else is a godless heathen, you see.

Good Grief

When President Obama spoke Tuesday evening on his policy for cleaning up the mess in Afghanistan he inherited from President Bush, the various TV networks naturally bumped their original programming to make room for it. It was, after all, a major address on a major issue. It is therefore a depressingly common sign of the times to see how some people are turning it into something completely ridiculous.

Specifically, Russell Wiseman, the mayor of Arlington, Tennessee, thought he saw something sinister in the speech's timing - namely, to displace ABC's annual showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Seriously.

On his private Facebook page, whose contents were promptly leaked, Wiseman griped:

Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation [sic] about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'....

As Lucy van Pelt would say, what a blockhead. Out of all the bizarre stuff said about Obama, this ranks way up there - or down there, depending on your point of view.

I was going to say something along these lines, but DailyKos got there first:

Just imagine the scene in the Situation Room - the President, with his secret Muslim agenda, Pentagon officials and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pouring over the holiday TV schedule to determine what would be the perfect day to announce they were sending 30,000 more soldiers into harm's way and to [f-word] over Russell Wiseman's kids.

Is there anything Obama's political opponents won't believe? Or will they happily continue to swallow anything which comes down the pike, no matter how crazy it is?

If Wiseman is any indicator, it's probably the latter one.