While it never surprises me when self-proclaimed “Christians” behave insufferably, for some reason they always seem to kick it up a notch or two during the Christmas season.  It never ends well for them, yet they doggedly persist in turning Jesus’ birthday into a colicky whine-fest about, you guessed it, themselves.  Baby Jesus, it increasingly seems, can’t get a wail in edgewise over the din of his caterwauling nursery mates.

It starts like clockwork, right after turkey leftovers, with some tale or other, often false, about how some school/city/official “banned” some ostensibly innocuous religious display/greeting/other tasteless object, and dang it, that just goes to show that liberals are terrible, bible-bangers are under siege, and please buy the latest book about it.

That none of these things are actually happening is of course beside the point.  Once you claim to believe in things like virgin births and whatnot, why not confidently assert that Santa Claus is also real, and that he looks something like Archie Bunker?  Well, if you’re Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, you do just that, on national television, adding for good measure that Jesus is white, too, and he looks like Leonardo deCaprio in ‘Titanic.”

But the confident spouting of such bigoted nonsense is simply the means to the end; the predictable howls of laughter and ridicule that inevitably ensue is.  Once criticized, the cretin in question is immediately elevated to martyr, much to their delight.  For Kelly, that means taking a personal day, then calling your critics “humorless,” although they were all a lot funnier than she was, and trotting out the chestnut about liberal meanies having it in for Fox.  Yawn.

Fortunately for Kelly, her limping balloon in the War on Christmas parade was punctured by bayou buckshot in the form of a bearded not-wise man in the form of “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson, whose peculiar brand of Christianity seems to involve equal amounts of longing for the days when darkies weren’t so uppity, and horror about butt sex.  Unsurprisingly, Robertson was tossed from his unaccountably popular “reality” show, which naturally starts the Wurlitzer rolling all over again.

Of course, since what Robertson said was even dumber and more offensive than Kelly’s comments, he had to rely on dumber and more offensive defenders, beginning with Bobby Jindal and hitting every other branch in the stupid tree on the way down, finally landing on the soft blubber of Erick Erickson.

Sarah Palin, still waxing triumphant over the firing of Martin Bashir, typed out an unintentionally hilarious word salad about “Freedom of Speech,” excoriating “intolerants” without the slightest trace of irony.  Jindal and Ted Cruz sounded similar notes, and in considerably better English, but was just as dumb.  For the right, “free speech” means the right to make an ass of oneself before audiences of millions, forever.  But only for themselves, natch.

Yet Erickson was by far the creepiest; darkly intoning that the forces of sin would be made to pay soon enough, sounding more like an abortion clinic bomber than a CNN (!) commentator.

Christmas is still a week away, but the fruitcakes are already piling up.

Photo by hollywoodsmile78, used under Creative Commons license