SCRIPTOIDS: Yippie-ki-yay fellow elves

Imagine my surprise this Xmas Eve afternoon to discover that FOXNews had scrapped it usual incisive reportage to broadcast Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Christmas Special. I knew that News Corp./Fox Entertainment GroupNews Corp recently purchased a “top spirituality site Beliefnet, expanding its faith-related properties to the Web,” but I never expected them to interrupt their news broadcasts for hour-long blocks to bring us the Rickster.

I watched a bit of the program. It didn’t seem to have the gravitas and pageantry of the annual Papal Christmas Mass Live From Rome! It was more like a PBS Dr. Wayne Dyer special but with lots of poinsettias.
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Ever wonder: what do cultural backlashers do on their days off, you know, when they are not intentionally annoying the rest of us? On December 26, what becomes of the legions of War on Xmas fabricators, like Brent Bozell (The Third, not The Second), who typically start howling on Labor Day that the nation is insufficiently Christmas-y.

The Christmas season is upon us, which means it's that special time of year for the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State to make sure no wayward city council will allow a whiff of frankincense on government property.”

Oh come on now! At the first whiff of frankincense on government property, the entire building -- hell, the entire city -- would be evacuated, HazMat and bomb squad crews would be called in, Homeland Security would jiggle the Terror Code Color Chart, and Halliburton would be awarded a $53 billion no-bid, cost-plus contract. Oh, and the DEA would be nosing around too just in case the whiff of frankincense is the first sign of a new designer drug.

And what of dotty old Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. What does he do on those rare days when he’s not fag-baiting the world? Does he treat his grandkids to a couple rounds of goofy golf and then go home to watch Yentl dubbed in Yiddish? And what about Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage? What do they do when they aren’t being egregiously themselves?
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Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you to Benjamin Barber, author of Consumed and Jihad vs. McWorld, for pointing this out:

[American consumers] don't need to shop at 4:00 AM. I mean, I've been looking for signs saying, "Please open the stores at 4:00 AM so I can go shopping at 4:00 AM." I don't see any. I mean, that's the stores' ideas. That's the marketers' ideas. That's the idea to create this hysteria about purchasing. About buying and selling. That makes Americans feel that if they're not in the store at 4:00 AM or 2:00 AM, and some of them open at midnight Thursday. And now a whole bunch were open on Thanksgiving.

Mr. N. has been working in retail for years, and this year was the absolutely worst Christmas for work schedules. How indifferent to employee well-being do you have to be to schedule an extra-late close-up (meaning most employees get home well after midnight) followed the very next day by an extra-early morning start (meaning most employees have to get up at 5 or 5:30 in the morning)?

Really, what would Jesus do?
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Finally -- the last of the things I do not want for Xmas