Happy Holidays To All Christmas-Haters

Several bits on the tempest in a teapot that right-wing crank loyalists are trying to whip up: the "attack on Christmas". Start with an in-depth discussion at WorkingForChange: Christmas under attack: A manufactured crisis.

"About 95 percent of the whining from the far right" has more to do with fundraising than Christmas, Boston pointed out. "They're trying to get people worked up so they will think Christmas is being removed from public life. There isn't any evidence that's happening."

Meanwhile, Bob Harris wonders, Why Is Bill O'Reilly Trying To Destroy Christmas?, with evidence of hypocrisy on O'Reilly's website (note the yellow arrow). Note that this has since been changed on O'Reilly's site, prompting me to wonder if that screenshot was a Photoshop fake; easy enough to do. But I went to Google's cache, and viewed the source, which includes the JavaScript for that menu. It included this, at line 368:

Menu4_1=new Array("Recommended Holiday Gifts", "/pg/jsp/general/buylist.jsp;jsessionid=55CFA467C9A8F0AA69C52F4858FC8779","",0,20,170, "" , "", "", "", "", "", -1, -1, -1, "", "");

Lastly, This Modern World sums it up well:

Leaving the question of different faiths and holiday traditions aside... the majority of people in this country will be celebrating two holidays within the space of a week — Christmas and New Year’s. Contra O’Reilly, et al., “happy holidays” and “season’s greetings” are mostly a shorthand way of conveying best wishes for the holiday cluster.