Merry Holidays!

I've been talking a bunch on this blog about Bill O'Reilly and his outrageous accusations that "secular America" is trying to destroy the holiday of Christmas. All you need to do is look around to see that isn't true. "Jingle Bell Rock" is getting more play this week than Kanye West and Beyonce put together, and that song is unlistenably bad. Seriously, I know you guys love you some Christmas songs, and it can't always be "Silver Bells" and that one about Good King Wencelas, but "Jingle Bell Rock" is a travesty. It's not even rock! It's barely country!

But I digress. My point was that Billy O has made up all these lies about secularists trying to steal Christmas, and he mainly bases the case on this idea that department stores are instructing their employees to say "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas."

This is not only incredibly stupid (as retail stores should be allowed to instruct their employees however they wish, so long as the instructed behavior is not illegal or immoral), but old news. I worked at Barnes & Noble four Christmases ago, and we always said "Happy Holidays" to customers rather than "Merry Christmas."

So, this is a dumb argument. Granted, no dumber than other arguments Bill McO'Reilly makes, but dumb all the same.

But Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly takes the question a step further. To wit:

No, what I want to know is this: how do they spread these memes so damn fast? I mean, liberals are just barely starting to get a smidgen of attention for the proposition that Social Security isn't really in serious trouble — a meme that has the advantage of actually being true — while the "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas" meme has exploded onto front pages around the country (and the world!) in a matter of days.

And he's right! I can think of all kinds of sound liberal arguments that get lost in the white noise of political discourse, but these kind of dumb Republican non-issue issues always become big news.

Atrios offers the theory that Republicans have an organized system in place for dispersing information quickly to the masses. In essence, it goes like this:

Local News --> Free Republic --> Drudge --> Talk Radio --> Some Wingnut Congressperson/State Legislator --> Fox News --> Lou Dobbs/Scarborough/etc... --> Another round on local news --> CNN --> mainstream print media

That does seem to be the route these stories take, but I'm not sure that liberals couldn't make use of a similar system.

I think the more serious problem is that, more often than not, these right-wing memes are so stupid, liberals like myself can't help but retell them to other people in order to mock them. (For example, this blog entry, or the many others I've done debunking stupid crap Bill O'Reilly says).

So, you get the enemy helping you to spread your latest dish around as well as your media friends, and your information gets out to the people that much faster. So, what can be done? Shut down liberal blogs in the hope that we won't shoot ourselves in the foot trying to dispel stupid, pointless rumors? Rant about the growing right-wing control of the major media in this country? I honestly have no idea.