HAVE A MISERABLE NATIONAL REVIEW CHRISTMAS!

National Review has a holiday-themed front page today, and by holiday I mean "War on Christmas," the title and topic of Jonah Goldberg's contribution. I have long maintained -- and a plurality of Americans now seem to agree -- that the WoC is a ridiculous scam. But Goldberg insists it's a clear and present danger and it's all liberals' fault.

Alas, today’s “war on Christmas,” which has become for cable news an annual ritual, is merely another one of those metaphorical wars, like the wars on women, poverty, cancer, global warming, history, energy, religion, and science. (I’m sure I’m leaving a few dozen out.)

Of course “metaphorical” doesn’t mean “fictional.” The “war” on poverty is — or was — a real thing; it just wasn’t a war. 

And yet the metaphorical wars have the capacity to elicit as much outrage as actual wars... 

Oops, sorry, I left in some of his column-padding gibberish (more plentiful than usual -- maybe this is how they keep him busy so he won't eat the turkey before it's cooked). Let's get right to the something-resembling-a-point:

But the war on Christmas represents a special kind of passive-aggressive jackassery because the aggressors deny they have declared a war. They simply take offense at Christmas cheer. They cancel Christmas pageants. They leave baby Jesus in a cardboard box in the church basement, but see nothing wrong with celebrating the Winter Solstice as if that’s a more rational thing to do. 

No explanatory links, of course, but it seems Goldberg's confusing the ACLU's mission of defending unpopular Constitutional rights (say, wasn't that what the Tea Party was all about?) with the rest of us walking around not giving a shit whether someone says Merry Christmas or not. Also, Goldberg thinks, as conservatives often do, that liberals trick him and his Fox News buddies into being psycho about it:

And then, when people complain about this undeclared war on Christmas, the aggressors mock and ridicule them for paranoia and hyperbole.

We don't even declare our War on Christmas. We just go around singing our satanic Solstice carols and pissing them off. It's so unfair! MERRY CHRISTMAS KILL CLOUSEAU!

Also at NR:

•  Kevin D. Williamson, best known as a rageclown who thinks women who have abortions should be executed and a bunch of other crazy shit, does his version of an inspirational religious story. Shorter: There are people who run soup kitchens and AA meetings, therefore Christ is real. At times it sounds like he's at least heard of Christianity --

The boy grows into a man, and the question of family is always at the center of His thinking. “Who is my mother, or my brethren?” He asks. “Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.” He tells of hated foreigners adopting the wounded and the vulnerable of His own nation as their own, and shames His own people with that story of alien kindness...

-- and then you remember that he's against accepting Syrian refugees because he's scared they'll kill him ("Where there is Islam, there will be Islamic extremism, Islamic supremacism, and murder") and you realize he's even more full of shit when he pretends to be religious as when he doesn't bother.

•  Speaking of immigrant-haters, this is from Victor Davis Hanson's contribution:

Many Americans oppose illegal immigration and want to slow down legal immigration not because the most welcoming nation in the world is suddenly xenophobic, nativist, or racist, as cheaply alleged. Too often, immigrants assume that America owes them rather than they owe America — sort of like an uninvited guest moving into the house of the host and berating him over the menu and accommodations.

How could we have guessed Hanson would spend Christmas bitching about furriners? Guess he never got over the loss of his chainsaw.

•  Mona Charen is Jewish, but she was shocked to find -- after apparently not having been downtown on Christmas in many years -- "not only were all the restaurants open, they were also packed." And this is a big deal because --

I had pictured my Christian friends and neighbors at home, gathered around the table Norman Rockwell–style, eating goose or ham or whatever gentiles eat bathed in the twinkling lights of decorated trees. In fact, I liked to think of them that way, and finding crowds treating Christmas Eve as just another night was almost a sacrilege.

Well, maybe you should have asked your "friends" what they were doing for Christmas.

Americans have long resisted the secularizing trend of Western Europe.

Ugh, yes, you see it coming: We are becoming Godless, which is just what the Democrats want, so repent and make Marco Rubio president.

There's plenty more and worse, but this is not Easter, when we celebrate redemption through suffering, but Christmas, when we celebrate Darren McGavin and a lamp that looks like a leg. So have yourself a merry little Christmas (THERE I SAID CHRISTMAS) or whatever winter orgy you choose to celebrate.