Ho, Ho, Ho

I've heard it bruited (look it up) about that the Rude Pundit recently wrote a thing about the time he was a mall Santa.

Cool, cool.

But does he have photographic evidence of himself wearing the red and white?  Because I do.  

That picture above?  That's me circa 1977 or 1978, when I worked in the stockroom of the Sears store in Park Forest, which was an objectively awesome job.  

The store is long gone, as is the building.  This building.

The basement beneath the building where I worked is also gone.  

The entire Park Forest Plaza it anchored has been virtually abandoned and then feebly revived a few times. 

The  indoor mall that killed it -- the Lincoln Mall -- has itself been killed by online sales and abandoned.

But the photograph of me wearing the suit remains.

The regular Santa guy had failed to show.  Drunk, probably, and they needed someone in a hurry to put on the suit, sit in the chair and chat with the kids while the mothers of Park Forest photographed Old St. Nick dandling their little ones on his knee.   

Physically, I made a terrible Santa.  By that age I had hit my full height.  6' 8".  I was rail-thin -- weighted maybe 130 pounds soaking wet.  Bony knees.  So not exactly...

He had a broad face and a little round belly,

that shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf...

But the kids didn't care.  And my boss John -- who was an excellent boss -- just needed someone in a hurry who could sit for a few hours and not scare the kids, and why the hell not? The beard and wig were old-polyester itchy and the suit smelled ancient, but again, why the hell not?  It helped John out of a jam, and I got to be part of that merry little seasonal conspiracy between parents and department stores.  All in all, an easy gig.

My mom got wind of what I was up to and came by to take that picture of me.  Bless her heart for hanging onto it and eventually passing it along to me.  Which, in the fullness of time, allowed me to say this: "Check and mate, Rude Pundit!"

Hit The Tip Jar To Stay Off My "Naughty" List.

Professional Left Podcast Episode 864: President Musk ...and More Royko

"It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway', but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies." -- Mike Royko

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Professional Left Podcast Episode #767

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” -- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

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Time to Break Out

The seasonal ornaments.

A War-on-Christmas Repost:

I want you To remember that no bastard ever won the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma.

He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his dogma.

You can still hear a few crack and pops of faraway artillery from the wingnut rear guard itching to gin up fight, but the real War on Christmas mongers -- the Hate Media outlets, who always need some Fresh!Fake!Outrage! to keep the Pig People amped up and watching -- has gotten bored with it. Like many a toy from Mithrasmases gone by, the GWOX's (Global War on Xmas) paint has faded. Its moving parts have worn out. And it goes through batteries like David Vitter goes through hookers.

Not that any of that matters.

Swap "Clinton Impeachment" out for GWOX and you get exactly the same rhetoric. Swap GWOX for Teabagging, ditto. Swap it for ACORNoia, ditto. Swap ACORN for Obama-the-Kenyan-Usurper, ditto. And so on, and on, and on without end.

It is the same poison with different food coloring offered up to those millions of criminally delusional citizens who cling to their belief that Barack Obama (the guy who buddied up to the Conservatives in his class at Harvard, then buddied up to his Republican colleagues in Springfield, and who has again and again sacrificed or cripplingly compromised core Liberal policies and ideals to mollify some nonexistent group of "reasonable" Republicans) is a really secret Commie who has been (as was explained to me at a party last week) steeped -- steeped I tell you -- "in the ways of radicals like Saul Alinsky" every bit as fiercely and irrationally as any Evangelical clings to Creationism and The Rapture.

For these people, I have no hope at all. None. For 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they have no capacity for introspection; no ability to recognize that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in Alinsky, but in themselves.

And for 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they will always fall for the Internal Enemy bullshit being marketed to them by the very people whose policies are actually fucking them and the country the claim to love into the ground.

And so I bring you another driftglass seasonally appropriate "War on Christmas" repost (stolen from the movie "Patton" and cruelly forced to serve wicked, Liberal ends by me), because, the War Behind the Global War on Xmas is the one that never ends.

Men, all this stuff you've heard about Pig People not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the War for Christmas is a lot of horse dung. Pig People, traditionally, love to fight for Jesus. All real Pig People love the sting of battle.

When you were kids you all admired the champion draft deferrer, the biggest rich kid, John Birch, and the guy whose daddy could hire the toughest boxer. Pig People love a winner and will not tolerate a loser…except for the whole War of Northern Aggression thing.

And the Jim Crow thing.

And the “Segregation Now” thing.

And the “Loving vs. Virginia” thing.

But other than that, Pig People play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Pig People have never lost and will never lose a war…and Vietnam does NOT count because it was only a “police action” and not a Real War like the War on Christmas. And anyway, we coulda won – were on the verge of winning – when we were betraaaayed by Cronkite and Jane Fonda and the dirty hippies.

Anyhoo, the very thought of losing is hateful to Pig People. As is the thought of Tolerance.
And Science.
And Causality.
And Compromise.
And every other religion in the history of the Universe.

Now, a Chairborne-Again army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality and “thinking for yourself” and “asking gotcha questions of the Sarah Palin” stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Washington Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about the why fornicating and terrorism are both caused by feminists, queers, teaching Evolution in the public schools and the ACLU.

Now we have the finest food, Chick Tracts, the best hair, and the most extremely heterosexual men in the world. You know, by God I...I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against, by God, I do. We're not just going to shoot these Liberal “Good Will Towards Men” bastards; we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of Santa’s Sleigh.

We're going to murder those lousy “Tolerant”, “Turn the other check” bastards by the Hanukah Bushel.

Now, some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chickenhawk out under fire. Don't worry about that.

I can assure you that you will, just like your fathers and grandfathers before you.

That is, if this were an actual “war” war. Then we’d just send poor Negros, Spics and hillbillies off to do our fighting for us.

But this is just some faked-up Holiday Hatred invented by knee-biters like Bill O'Reilly to keep the stoopids distracted and divided, facing the wrong direction, and screaming the wrong slogans so they never noticed how routinely and ineptly the Cheney Administration lied to them and fucked them over.

The Liberals are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood in the name of the Redeemer. Shoot them in the belly for the sake of the Lamb of God.

When you put your hand into a bunch of Nondenominational “Holiday” goo that a moment before was your best friend's Manger Scene, you'll know what to do!

Now there's another thing I want you to remember: I don't want to get any messages that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Liberals do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested into holding onto anything except the enemy.

To celebrate the fake birthday of the King of Kings, we're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. In the name of the Son of the Living God, we're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like mouthbreathers through a WalMart on double-coupon day!

Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back to you Mommy’s Basement, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what did you do in the great Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in Iraq?

You can proudly say, "Well, first I called everyone that didn't support the Cheney Administration a traitor and a coward. Then I cowered under the bed like a little bitch while far better men and women than I went off to bleed and die to cover the margin call on the Cheney Administration's stupid, reckless gamble. Then I re-elected him! Then I went out and spit on a dirty Jew to commemorate the fake birthday of my Lord and Savior."

Alright, now you sons-a-bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful fucktards into a completely faked-up, Potemkin battle anytime, anywhere.

Like, say, Easter.

That's all.

Your Friday Podcast -- Christmas Edition

The best way to cheer yourself
is to try to cheer somebody else up.

-- Mark Twain

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Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

What Would Christmas Be

Without Sarah Silverman calling Santa a dick?

Of course, like most holiday standards, this is NSFW.

'Tis The Season

The bluesy holiday standard that rivals "The Gift of the Magi" for sketching a fast Christmas masterpiece out of a handful of perfect, aching details.

Charlie, I think about you
Every time I pass the filling station
On account of all the grease
You used to wear in your hair.
Still have that record --
Little Anthony and The Imperials.
Someone stole my record player
How do you like that?

I Can No Longer Sit Back And Allow

Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious Yuletidey fluids.

Begun, this War on Christmas has.

From the LA Times:

Gap's Christmas cheer makes a boycott backfire
The American Family Assn. attacked Gap for not using the word 'Christmas' in its advertising -- but in fact it does, and in a big way too.

The Mississippi-based American Family Assn. last week issued a fatwa against Gap Inc. -- the retailing giant whose brands include Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic -- calling for a "two-month boycott over the company's failure to use the word 'Christmas' in its advertising to Christmas shoppers."

The War on Christmas season has officially begun.

Gap "does not use the word 'Christmas' to avoid offending those who don't embrace its meaning," writes Buddy Smith, executive assistant to the president of the AFA, on the organization's website. "Christmas has historically been very good for commerce. But now Gap wants the commerce but no Christmas."

"I interpret Gap's decision as a warning sign to Christians to get out there and tell people about Jesus Christ," writes Smith.

...
But here's the real question: Why attack Gap for not using the word "Christmas" in its advertising when in fact it does, and in a big way too?

Were I a speculating sort of person, I would speculate that it's because Donald Wildmon, his son Timmy, and the rest of the vicious inbred shit-kicking colporteurs at the American Family Association find perverting the teachings of Christ in order to extort nuisance, go-away money from corporations and terrorize contributions out of credulous hillbillies easier than, y'know, honest work.

But that would be mean.

And Mithras Claus doesn't leave libidinous liberal lasses and 20-year-old scotch under the Solstice trees of mean bloggers.