The Anatomy Of A Glenn Beck Lie

Glenn Beck Rodeo ClownGlenn Beck’s glassy-eyed followers are irredeemably mesmerized by him and would sooner hack off a limb then concede that he was less than honest about anything. They wail plaintively that he is unwaveringly truthful and that no one has ever proven that he has lied. For the record, I have proven it many times.

On today’s program Beck was generous enough to provide another example of his compulsive dishonesty. And it was packaged in a familiar form for Beck: the old out-of-context video clip gambit. On this occasion Beck presented this segment of President Obama discussing health care:

Obama: [W]e said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

After playing the clip, Beck went into outrage overdrive, complaining first about the sentence fragment “…consistent in saying to people…” implying that Obama was only “saying” these things and that he didn’t mean them. Only an idiot would interpret these extemporaneous remarks in context that way. And that, of course, is Beck’s built-in excuse.

But the larger corruption of the truth was Beck’s reaction to the news that some provisions were “snuck” into the bill that violated the pledge that no one would get between you and your doctor. Beck was aghast that the President would tolerate such legislative misbehavior. He castigated the President for not immediately putting a halt to Congress’s covert attempt to countermand his promise and tarnish his honor. Beck went on to declare that if the President had spoken up about this, that he (Beck) would heartily approve:

Beck: Well let me tell you something. Not only would that be the right thing for any president to do, his approval ratings would go through the roof. People would actually say “Well OK now, wait a minute. If he’s gonna do that I might actually listen to him.”

Apparently Beck wasn’t listening because Obama did precisely what Beck was accusing him of not doing. Obama expressly stated that he had caught the errant provisions and set about eliminating them. And this information was in the very segment that Beck had just played on the air. Except that Beck cut out the parts where Obama talked about scrubbing the problem provisions. Here’s the quote again in full. Note that the bold section in the middle is the only part that Beck played:

Obama: If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example…

…we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

And so we are in the process of scrubbing them and making sure that it’s tight.

The complete clip shows unequivocally that Obama is keeping his pledge regarding the doctor/patient relationship. In fact, he was merely giving an example of incidents where institutional kinks can waylay legislation and demonstrating that he wasn’t falling for it. But Beck’s audience won’t know that because Beck unscrupulously edited it out. Then he portrayed the President as negligent for not doing something that in reality he did. And he even went so far as to admit that the American people would reward the President for doing the things that Beck left on the cutting room floor. And, of course, that’s reason Beck did it.

Beck certainly knew the content of the whole speech. So it is inescapable that he deliberately misrepresented it to advance his deceit. He purposefully truncated it to prevent his audience from seeing anything about Obama that they might regard as positive. And in the process he hammered Obama for not doing what he actually did do.

It’s too bad that most of Beck’s disciples will never hear about this fraud. Although many are so thoroughly bewitched that they might not even grasp it if they did hear about it. But it is important to continue to document it. Open minded people who haven’t formed opinions about Beck need to have this kind of information to keep from being duped by him.

The NeoCon Plan To Save Obama’s Presidency: Bomb Iran

If you weren’t already repulsed by the rampant cynicism and callousness of the uber-right in America, then an article just published in the National Review should do the trick.

Notorious NeoCon, Daniel Pipes, penned a column that purports to be offering President Obama advice on how to improve his favorability ratings: Bomb Iran!

The notion that any president should order military engagement for the purpose of shoring up polling numbers can only be acceptable to far-right vultures like Pipes. But Pipes is serious about this. The article is not titled “How to eliminate the Iranian Nuclear Threat.” It is titled “How to Save the Obama Presidency.” He even cited as an example the polling bump George W. Bush got after 9/11:

“Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene.”

This advice from Pipes could not be more wrong, both morally and strategically. On the moral scale, Pipes is suggesting that the President put the lives of American troops at risk for political gain. He argues that this would be “a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him.” Why Pipes thinks that that is an appropriate justification for war, he never adequately explains.

But Pipes is also wrong from a strategic standpoint. He asserts that such an attack “would require few ‘boots on the ground’ and entail relatively few casualties.” This shallow assessment ignores the obvious lessons of past military debacles in the region. It is particularly surprising given that Pipes himself admitted that he had misread the risks associated with the war in Iraq. In his article in April of 2003, he belittled admonitions from regional experts that the invasion of Iraq would exacerbate tensions, escalate terrorism, and aid the recruiting efforts of Al Qaeda. He dismissed those warnings saying, “Actually, the precise opposite is more likely to happen.”

Pipes predicted few casualties in Iraq as well. He also bought in to the myth that the war would be short, would reduce terrorism, would produce stability, and that the Iraqis would greet us with candy and flowers. We all know now that the experts were right and Pipes was grievously wrong, as he himself admitted three years later in an update to his original article.

Will we have to wait another three years for Pipes to confess that his fatally flawed judgment failed him again? It certainly hasn’t stopped him from making a similarly erroneous assessment with regard to Iran. And this time he wraps it in a grotesquely political cloak to conceal his true intentions.

Pipes freely admits that he has no interest in seeing Obama’s popularity rise. So the suggestion to bomb Iran is not really a gesture of support for the Commander in Chief. It is more likely an expression of Pipes’ own obsession with hostility, and his thirst for blood. It is evidence of his antipathy for the people of the Middle East. And it is affirmation of his inability to form unbiased conclusions on serious matters like war.

For this he would sacrifice American and Iranian lives; he would promote the cause of jihadists; he would destroy the nascent democracy movement in Iran; and he would commit our nation to a third battlefront in a part of the world that is already unstable and distrustful of our motives. He is advising nothing less than a Crusade. And we know what happened the last time we had one of those.

SOTU: Cue The Silly Arguments And Sound Bites

Tonight the President delivered a rather typical State of the Union speech. That is not a judgment as to its content, but recognition that most State of the Union speeches have the same political goals. The President covered the territory that he regards as his priorities and exhibited the requisite measure of empathy for the difficulties many Americans are enduring. He also balanced his resolve to continue fighting for his health care and jobs programs, with a nod to his trademark (and pointless) affinity for bipartisanship.

But this is the part that stood out for me:

“Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions – our corporations, our media, and yes, our government – still reflect these same values. […] The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates into silly arguments, and big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away. No wonder there’s so much cynicism out there. No wonder there’s so much disappointment.”

And with that the silly arguments and sound bites ensued. It hardly mattered what the President said because the reactions from the TV pundits were as predictable as the sunrise. Charles Krauthammer didn’t think the speech was presidential. Chris Matthews forgot for an hour that the President was black. And Sarah Palin – oh hell, I couldn’t really figure out what she was trying to say. Her run-on gibberish mentioned something about him being condescending toward Republicans, but it was impossible to translate into English.

I can, however, empathize with the President’s frustration with the media. But it may be naive to expect much to change. Fox News is not likely to abandon their mission now that they have successfully created the world’s first Pavlovian network. Their viewers have been carefully trained to salivate when the bell rings. Just this afternoon Glenn Beck exhorted his audience to avoid the speech altogether:

“You don’t even have to watch the State of the Union. I’ll watch it for you.”

See how easy it is to understand the world when you have people like Glenn Beck to do all the messy work of actually having to be conscious? And talk about your silly arguments…Beck’s certainly got that covered.

State Of The Union: Are We Fundamentally Transformed Yet?

Even before President Obama delivers his State of the Union message, the rumblings of partisans can be heard rattling the media timbers. Democrats are putting the finishing touches on their heartfelt endorsements of the raw honesty of the speech and the bold agenda it laid out for America’s future. Republicans are polishing their spontaneous reactions to the flaccid presentation and counting every occurrence of keywords like “terror” or “deficit” as if the number of times you say them has an impact on their destiny. The post-game on these events is so thoroughly predictable it hardly requires a spoiler alert.

These ceremonies never really describe the state in which we find our union. It is more like a confessional wherein our shortcomings are enumerated and our commitment to dispatch them is renewed On both of those measures the President has much for which to answer. A little more than a year ago, just days before the election, he told a cheering audience of supporters that…

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

That was 453 days ago. I’m not sure that he can make a case that the U.S. has been fundamentally transformed yet. It was a stirring promise that was received with overwhelming enthusiasm at the time. But after a year of Town Howlers, Tea Baggers, and pusillanimous pundits praying for failure and openly weeping, that moment of inspiration has been twisted into an ominous threat. Glenn Beck repeatedly plays video of the sound bite with a sneering implication that the transformation Obama had in mind was one from an American fable of perpetual prosperity and freedom, to a hellish realm of impoverishment and tyranny. Never mind that many politicians invoke the vision of transformational change. Even Beck himself in his announcement for his contrived and disingenuous 9/12 Project:

Beck, 3/17/2009: We’ve got to fundamentally change. We’ve got to be involved.

Dick Cheney, 3/20/2008: There has been a huge fundamental change and transformation for the better.

Mitt Romney, 9/21/2007: [W]e’re going to have to take fundamental change in Washington.

Newt Gingrich, 2/7/2008: [A]nything less than fundamental change will lead ultimately to a weaker and more vulnerable America.

See? Everybody wants change. It’s a universal trait of humanity. Except for those who fear change. Which, ironically, is just as universal. Nonetheless, the hope and change that many were led to believe was just a new president away still eludes us. There is a laundry list of aspirations that remain unfulfilled. In fact, much of the current landscape looks eerily like the one we thought we had escaped.

  • Iraq
  • Afghanistan
  • Gitmo
  • Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
  • Rendition and Enhanced Interrogation
  • Patriot Act
  • Wall Street Bailouts
  • Massive Deficits
  • Record Foreclosures
  • Crippling Unemployment
  • Global Warming
  • Health Care

Even worse, the appetite for change, and for the agenda articulated in the campaign, has seemed to wither. It appears that all of the momentum today is for regression to the last decade’s legacy of war, greed, and the bliss that so famously accompanies ignorance. How else can you explain the once unimaginable yearning for a return to the shallow austerity of George W. Bush’s America? Could anyone have ever seriously predicted this:

No, I do not miss him. I do not miss the smirking arrogance, the corruption, the cronies, the incompetence, or the bull-headed insistence on selling our nation out to corporations and masters of war. But I do miss the hope that I held for a resurrection from the morbid state in which Bush left the union. I miss having faith that the goals to which our nation aspired were closer than ever to our grasp. I miss believing that we, as a country, were coming to our senses.

Many of the President’s defenders make the legitimate point that a year is not nearly long enough to erase the fiasco of the previous eight. But it would be nice to have the sense that we were a little farther down that road. With the disheartening compromise and collapse of the health care legislation, and the recent electoral debacles, and the enduring economic and job slump, and the persistent rise of right-wing media, it is getting harder to remain optimistic.

None of these issues will be resolved this evening when the President gives his speech. I don’t expect him to leave the podium with legislative victories in hand. Nor do I expect unemployment to decline tomorrow morning. And it appears unlikely that our troops will be returning from the Middle East any time soon. The only thing I would ask of the President from this address is that he return to the message that got him elected in the first place. I ask that he rediscover in himself the ambition to serve the poor and working-class Americans who worked their hearts out so that he could assume this high office and be their representative.

That’s all I ask. Just a simple request for a return to genuine compassion, fairness, and justice. Is that too much to hope for?

Fox News Poll: Obama Beats All Republicans In 2012

All it takes is a fluke victory in Massachusetts for Fox News pundits predict the demise of the Democratic Party. In the days since Scott Brown won the special election for the Senate the conservative press has been unreservedly giddy. They have proclaimed the end of everything from health care to the Obama presidency. The only problem is that nobody told the voters.

A poll from that bastion of socialist twaddle, Fox News, shows that Barack Obama is preferred over every Republican they surveyed against him.

By 47 percent to 35 percent Obama bests former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The president has an even wider edge over former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (55 percent to 31 percent), and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (53 percent to 29 percent).

On top of that, the Tea Bagger phenomenon is turning out to be the biggest bubble since the tulip mania. As I wrote in The Tea Party Delusion, the popularity of the movement is largely a mirage created by the media (i.e. Fox News). Almost half the country doesn’t even know they exist. In this new poll from Fox, they match Obama against a generic candidate from the Tea Party and Obama wins by more than two to one (48% to 23%). Even amongst Republicans a majority (54%) reject the Baggers.

Perhaps the rumors of the President’s demise are highly exaggerated. The significance of these results in a poll from an overtly hostile source cannot be understated. By the same token, the lesson of the Massachusetts race is that overconfidence is a dangerous extravagance.

The 2012 election is still 34 months away and the stable of potential opponents have a not-so-secret weapon: Fox News. Yes, the network that commissioned this poll actually employs four prospective GOP candidates. In addition to the two surveyed here, Palin and Gingrich, they also have Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum on the payroll. It is unprecedented that a so-called news enterprise would actually employ so many electoral adversaries from the same party, or for that matter, any party. You have to wonder if Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Bobby Jindal feel left out.

The association with Fox could prove valuable over the next two and a half years. The Fox Farm Team will have an opportunity to rack up a lot of free practice time on the air. That exposure, along with the rest of Fox’s advocacy for the rightist agenda, is an expensive asset that will only be afforded to members of the team.

Fox Nation HitlerAnd the coaching staff at Fox is already preparing the field. Fox Nation took the occasion of Brown’s victory to promote a video that portrays Democrats as despondent Nazis being berated by their leader, Adolf Hitler.

In the run up to the 2008 election, and in the year that followed, there were many complaints about the right-wing’s hyperbolic attempts to associate the President with Hitler, Stalin, or Marx, and despite the documented evidence of it, Fox always tried to dismiss it as overzealous opponents. But this video is unambiguously making the Nazi correlation and it is prominently featured on the Fox Nation web site. And it’s not the first time:

Fox Nation Hitler

The campaign for 2012 is clearly in progress and Fox is implementing their most aggressive and dirtiest game plan. But according to their own poll it isn’t yet having much of an effect. The operative word there is “yet.” If there is one thing that Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, et al have in abundance it is patience. This is just the bottom of the second inning and they have plenty of pine tar left to apply extra spin to the ball.

Fox Nation: Obama Reacts Too Swiftly To Haitian Earthquake

The headline on Fox Nation today shouts that: Pres. Obama Reacts to Haiti Earthquake Faster Than Christmas Bomber. How typical of Fox to turn a tragedy into a trivial partisan attack.

News Flash to Fox Nation: The Crotch Bomber succeeded in blowing up nothing other than his own loins. He was quickly subdued. The plane suffered no damage. There were no casualties amongst the passengers. He was taken into custody without incident and he remains incarcerated. Moments after the event there was no imminent risk to anyone on the plane or elsewhere. There was no reason to rush a response to the Crotch Bomber because the threat had been neutralized.

On the other hand, Haiti was struck by the worst earthquake the region has experienced in over two hundred years. Thousands may be dead, and thousands more in peril. Fast action is necessary and will undoubtedly save lives. The risk is severe and ongoing. But all the Fox Nationalists care about is politicizing the catastrophe and castigating the President for responding with appropriate urgency.

What a despicable bunch of cretins. Perhaps they would be happier with the Bush model that left New Orleans stranded, desperate, and dying, in the critical hours after Katrina.

At least the view from the right is thoroughly consistent. If a few air travelers (and wealthy airlines) are briefly threatened by an incompetent, wannabe terrorist, drop everything and rush off to Detroit. But if it’s an entire population of dark-skinned, poor people who are in danger, let them suffer. After all, as Rush Limbaugh said of the Haitian people this morning, “They produce zilch, zero, nada.” Therefore, there is no reason to extend any humanitarian services to alleviate their suffering. Or as Pat Robertson said, they brought it on themselves because they “swore a pact to the devil.” See? These lazy Satanists are just getting what they deserve.

For those who are not despicable rightist cretins, you can donate to Haitian relief efforts here:
International Committee of the Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
Oxfam International

Fox Nation Wonders What Obama Is Avoiding

The folks at Fox Nation featured a story today about the lack of recent press conferences by President Obama. They headlined the piece, “What’s Obama Avoiding? Six Months Since Pres Held Press Conf.”

That immediately struck me as funny because previously the Fox Nationalists made such a big deal about how often the President was holding press conferences with headlines like:

  • All Obama, All the Time: The President Is Getting Overexposed
  • Overexposed?
  • Another Speech: Obama Addressing Joint Session of Congress
  • Obama Presser Backfires… Approval Rating Dives
  • Obama to Do ‘Full Ginsburg’ on Sunday

So if the president does frequent press conferences he is overexposed. If he holds back for awhile he is hiding something. I wonder where the sweet spot is. And if it isn’t enough to merely point out the Fox Nation’s brazen hypocrisy, the truth was even articulated by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in the article to which they linked:

“The last time we had this conversation here about the president’s media strategy, I was informed by many of you that the president was overexposed.”

Do the Fox Nationalists even read the articles they link to? Or do they just slap disparaging headlines on any old article and expect that their audience isn’t going to bother reading it anyway? The answer is pretty clear. It is also clear that no matter what this administration does Fox will find a way to criticize it. If Obama healed a leper they would want him prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license.

Andrew Breitbart’s BigHypocrite.com

Today on Fox Nation they are featuring a story on whether President Obama’s advisor, David Axelrod, is losing control of the President’s image. The headline is accompanied by a photo collage of what the Fox Nationalists must think are silly pictures, but which most people would regard as human pictures.

What’s truly silly about this is that the item links to an article at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment web site that expounds at length on what a terrible job of image building the White House is doing. The author, Kristinn Taylor, is appalled by what he regards as inadequate visual communications:

“Richard Nixon had advertising executive H.R. Haldeman; Ronald Reagan had image master Mike Deaver; Barack Obama has public relations guru David Axelrod.

“All three men understood the power of visuals in communicating the strengths of the presidents they served on the campaign trail and in the office of the presidency.

“I don’t know where David Axelrod has been since President Obama began his ten-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but it is safe to say he is goofing off as much as his boss.”

Taylor goes on to lament that the Obama team has…

“…failed in their most basic duty of reassuring the American public that the president is on the job.”

First of all, it is rather revealing that right-wingers like Taylor, and his boss Breitbart, so openly revere the manipulative art of public relations. The fact that they regard the most basic duty of presidential staff as providing pictorial reassurances that the President is on the job, as opposed to helping the President to actually get the job done, says a great deal about the Breitbart philosophy.

These are a breed of propagandists whose heroes are masters of deception like Haldeman, Deaver, and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. And they are not in the least embarrassed to admit their preference for style and appearances over substance. That is the cornerstone of conservative leadership for decades. Reagan’s tough-guy, movie hero persona was thoroughly manufactured by PR professionals, as was Bush, Jr.’s cowboy everyman. Taylor’s article reinforces this superficial approach to public service and criticizes the Obama administration for not being sufficiently shallow.

It is also interesting to note that the complaint made by Taylor and company contradicts previous conservative complaints that this White House has been preoccupied with image. They never seem to tire of lame jokes about the President’s use of TelePrompters, or his photo-ops with the troops. On those occasions the President was being disingenuous for exploiting imagery. His aides were cynically attempting to manipulate the public, and were considered dishonorable for doing so. But now they are accused of failing in that “most basic duty” by not performing it.

I suppose it might be too much to expect Breitbart’s crew to refrain from hypocrisy. Taylor complained that it took four days for the White House to post a picture of the President on the phone. Oh my stars, someone get the smelling salts. In fact that wasn’t even true. There were many pictures of the President working, just not the ones Taylor cared to notice. He was too busy whimpering about presidential tiewear or the price of his hotel room.

In the end, as with most matters concerning this president, Obama cannot win. He is damned if he uses PR effectively, and he is damned if he doesn’t use it all. As Hillary Clinton once said, if he were to walk on water his critics would gripe that he can’t swim. But even more disturbing to me is the lust these people have for phoniness. They celebrate it and curse those who fail to worship it as they do. There is a place for reasonable image-making. But clearly the right has taken it way too far.

Is Glenn Beck Guilty Of Treason?

Rupert Murdoch’s pet paranoidal pea-brain, Glenn Beck, has been a persistent purveyor of fear for years. He has predicted the most dire catastrophes for America, its economy, its values, and its people. The stench of doom that surrounds him is debilitating even in small doses.

On his program yesterday, Beck leveled an accusation that President Obama, or someone on his staff, had threatened Sen. Ben Nelson with the closing of a military base in Benson’s state, Nebraska. The only evidence of such a threat was a posting by a former McCain spokesman with an anonymous source on the conservative Weekly Standard web site. But Beck has blown this unreliable, unverified, rumor up into a serious allegation that crossed over into territory into which even he can’t believe he is going:

“The Obama administration is possibly – and I can’t bring myself to say these words because it is abhorrent if it is true but it sure fits the pattern. They’re playing politics with the national security of the United States.”

Despite insisting that he couldn’t say the abhorrent words, he managed to summon up the resolve to say them in the very next sentence. And with those words he came within a hair’s breadth of declaring President Obama a traitor – several times.

“There’s a story at the bottom of the hour that if it is true, and we have three sources on it now, if it is true. I mean how much closer do you get to treason?

“But his party reportedly very angry and allegedly making threats. This one borders treason, I believe.”

“Threatening to weaken our national security defenses to fulfill your Utopian social justice agenda. To me that borders on treason.

Beck has a lot of nerve accusing other people of treason. There are numerous examples of him making statements that are hard to interpret as anything less than treasonous. He agreed with his guest Michael Scheuer, that…

“… the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.”

And he declared his own enmity of America in a discussion that speculated about civil war:

“And don’t get me wrong. I am against the government, and I think that they have just been horrible, and I do think they are betraying the principles of our founders every day they’re in office.”

During yesterday’s program, Beck dispensed his usual legal disclaimer that he may not have all the information necessary to draw a conclusion. He conceded that all parties involved, the White House and Sen. Nelson, have denied the allegation, which they did emphatically. Yet, just as he did with his floating of the FEMA prison camp nonsense, Beck went just far enough to introduce the heinous charges, then allowed them to simmer while his conspiracy-addled audience sucked in the fumes of malicious hearsay. But even that wasn’t enough as Beck explicitly characterized these rumors as fact:

“It doesn’t matter if it’s credible or not that they could do it. The fact that they threatened it – it is our national security.”

The truth is that the whole scenario is not credible and they couldn’t do it. The procedure for base closings takes years and was designed specifically to disallow political influence. Both the White House and Sen. Nelson would be aware of this. Therefore, the only purpose for advancing a vile and improbable lie like this one is to slander the President. Beck is deliberately seeking to cast the nation’s leader as a traitor, which could lead to removing him from office and imprisoning or even executing him. And since these charges are wholly unsupported, Beck’s intentions would be tantamount to assassination. This, if true, would make Beck a traitor. Is Glenn Beck guilty of treason? Well, to paraphrase him…

“No one wants to believe that the president of the United States host of a TV program or any of his advisors would stoop to these kinds of tactics. But what are we supposed to believe here?”

Exactly! What are we supposed to believe? I’m not accusing Beck of anything. I’m just asking questions. Beck knows that he can reach me here at this web site to respond to or correct any misinformation. To date he has not done so. That leads me to conclude that all of this is true. Why else wouldn’t he contact me?

Greetings from The War On Christmas

Just when you thought hostilities were subsiding, Fox Nation is escalating the War on Christmas. Their new volley of seasonal aggression kicks off with insinuations questioning President Obama’s sincerity with regard to his faith:

Fox Nation Obama Christmas

So the Obama’s cards don’t mention Christmas. Well, that must mean they are secret Muslim after all. Except for…..Uh oh…..

Click to enlarge:

These are the “Holiday” cards sent out by George and Laura Bush in 2006, 2007, and 2008. None of them mention Christmas either. I wonder what religion the Bush’s belonged to secretly. I’m going to guess it’s the Snake Handlers. That would explain how they could work so closely with people like Cheney and Rove.