The Mason Missile, December 26, 2011

Greetings, brothers and sisters! I wish everyone a happy holiday, whichever one you do-Hanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Years. Have a blast, celebrate ALL of them!
I am heartily SICK of the whines coming from the rightist contingent about the "war on Christmas," acting like Christians are being repressed and oppressed. (I continue to greet everybody “Happy holidays” - ALL of them.)
This whining comes from a political Christianist movement that has campaigned against Islamic Sharia law being implemented by the law courts in this country, and which demands ALL Muslim Americans, good law-abiding folk, be placed under surveillance; the same damn movement that demands prayer in public schools and who uses their alleged religious beliefs as an excuse to discriminate against lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender people, to prohibit same-sex marriage, and to prohibit LGBT people from military service, based on THEIR version of what they interpret as “Christianity.” Authoritarian/fascist movements, like this one, and like ALL bullies, tend to play the victim and the oppressed party when someone finally stands up to them.
Many of them have found a home in the Republican Party. In the debates of their presidential candidates, they cheered at the idea of an innocent person being executed, and of a person dying from lack of decent health care; and booed a young man in military service (which they supposedly love) serving in Iraq (which they still think was a good idea) simply because he was gay, as he asked the candidates if they would restore the stupid "don't and, don't tell" rule.
What a cliffhanger we’ve been through-with the extension of the payroll tax cut and of unemployment compensation. The House Republicans, Tea Party types, all of a sudden oppose tax cuts-but it was for working people, not for their corporate paymasters funding their campaigns. Do we have to keep going through this, a political movement dedicated entirely to keeping Obama looking bad so he doesn’t get reelected? The main thing is JOBS for working people, so they don’t have to go on welfare and be the scapegoat for federal budget deficits created by no taxes on corporations and unnecessary wars.
I’m still pleased with the Occupy movement; they have taken the media thunder out of the Tea Parties, simply by their organizing, coming together to express outrage at corporate dominance of our politics. The commercial media constantly errs to the right politically, so as not to offend corporate executives or long accepted conventional wisdom; thus the media made such a big deal of the Tea Parties, hyping them as a popular uprising, and not as the Astroturf corporate-sponsored event it has always been. The Occupy movement, however, was brought up over alternative media sites, about two weeks before the mainstream media found it. While we must work to find our way into the media to get our message across, we find we can do without it, using our own networks.
Let’s celebrate the New Year, so we’ll be rested up to fight for the people. Bye!