‘Tis the Season to be Offended

What strange times we live in.

Today I went to check Drudge, and I saw a photo of a duck with the word “LAME” superimposed on it. It was a baby duck, I should add. Not a big, mature, adult duck. Drudge put it up in reference to a story about the Russian reaction to Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats.

Isn’t it strange that he’s quick to expel diplomats while he has no interest in keeping terrorists, murderers, thieves, and rapists out? Maybe the best way to get rid of illegal aliens is to have them get jobs at the Russian Embassy.

I figured Drudge was trying to be cute, but then I looked into the matter, and I found out the Russian Embassy posted the photo first, on its Twitter account. The Russian Embassy gets in Twitter battles! We need a good term for this activity. How about “Twitfights”?

I’ll bet other people are already using that term. How about “wars of attwition”?

Here is my understanding of the story:

1. Hillary Clinton lost the election.

2. Obama was mad, because the world owed the left all power and glory.

3. Obama blamed Wikileaks, which had leaked damaging info on Hillary.

4. Wikileaks claims the information came from American Democrats.

5. Obama blamed the Russians, for reasons we haven’t been told yet. Perhaps it’s above our pay grade.

6. Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the US.

The humorous part about all this is that Vladimir Putin came out looking like the adult in the room. He declined to expel anyone, and he had his people publicly invite the children of American diplomats to a Christmas (not “holiday”) celebration at the Kremlin.

Vladimir Putin says “Christmas,” and Obama doesn’t, because Obama thinks Christmas is the Confederate flag of holidays. Liberals hate Christmas even more than Obama loves the murder of the unborn, which is saying a lot. Obama voted against a law that would have required doctors to provide care for babies that survived abortion.

By the way, have you noticed that Bill O’Reilly turned out to be right about the War on Christmas? Remember how he was ridiculed for it? This season has been scrupulously sterilized of all Christmas references. Like no other before it. When I went to stores this season, I almost never heard anyone say, “Merry Christmas,” and when I did, they generally had a defiant air, just as I did when I returned the greeting.

I saw a ridiculous ad promoting a publicly funded celebration involved a “community holiday tree.” I’m not making that up. What holiday is decorated trees associated with? Tet? Walpurgisnacht? Beltane? Help me remember.

Actually, we did get the tree from a pagan holiday. But still.

Where is the “community holiday menorah”? Can I see that please?

It’s absurd. It expands the realm of absurdity, just like the bizarre claims that Bruce Jenner is a woman.

For the first time, Christmas was nearly 100% Jesus-free. It was just an opportunity to go to malls and riot over trinkets made in China. Presents! That’s what Christmas is about. We should call it “Present Day,” and we could call the second ghost Scrooge met “the Ghost of Present Day Past.”

I’ve quit giving really good Christmas presents. Except for my dad, I pretty much top out at $30, and for kids, it’s more like $25. I resent feeling obligated to spend four figures to support a disgraceful, godless orgy of materialism. You can be good to people in July if you want. You don’t have to save up and wait for an officially sanctioned mall stampede.

We don’t have Christmas any more. We just have a rootless, totally arbitrary celebration of giving each other things we can’t afford. Let’s call it Credit Day! The Bible says the borrower is slave to the lender. How about “Slavery Day”? Most of us go into debt at this time of year. The Bible’s warnings about borrowing are treated like quaint curiosities from an unenlightened past.

O’Reilly is annoying, but he got this one absolutely right, with no hope of credible refutation. Anyone who says there is no War on Christmas looks stupid and dishonest at this point.

They’re like the people who continue to say relations between Obama and Netanyahu are good.

The War on Christmas wasn’t truly lost until we decided men could marry each other. That’s no coincidence. There is a huge gay movement to eradicate Christianity, because people seriously believe their unusual sexual desires are that important. Gays are openly persecuting Christians now, and a lot of Americans are willing to go along with stifling Christianity simply to make the unpleasantness go away. A lot of us will accept just about anything as long as we can have our cocoa and avoid confrontation.

Sex is not that important to me. I wish I had a lower sex drive. It amazes me that people pay for drugs to increase their sex drive.

I do not understand people whose whole lives revolve around sex. It’s not that great, even when it’s good. An hour or two of fun, okay, but it’s not so great you should make it the reason you live. I don’t understand people who think it’s torture to do without it. We all want a certain amount of sex, but it’s not like food or air. It’s not essential.

Sometimes I think I don’t understand other people’s feelings about sex. I once had an unsuitable woman chase me in vain, and she kept talking about how long it had been since she had had sex. Last thing I wanted to hear. Gross. Her chances of having a romantic relationship with me were about like my chances of having a romantic relationship with Tim Tebow. There are some people you could never, ever even consider thinking of that way. When a person like that talks about sex, you cringe and wait for it to end.

It had been longer for me than for her, but I wasn’t jonesing like a junkie all day. I still do not understand what was wrong with her.

I’ve read all sorts of literary works featuring characters who seemed to tacitly agree that sex was the central feature of life, and that fornication was completely normal and acceptable. I don’t get it. How can anyone stand a life that shallow? It reduces us to the level of dogs and monkeys. Isn’t anything else important? Family? Leading a useful life? Hobbies? The arts? Are we just goats that can read?

I finished reading Boccaccio this week, and I started on Montaigne. Boccaccio wrote about sex as if every person who gets an opportunity to have it, at any time, was expected to go for it. Married, unmarried, rape, whatever. He wrote as if it were impossible to understand the inner workings of a person who would forgo any sexual opportunity.

I had been told Montaigne was a great thinker, but sure enough, he was obsessed with sex. So far in my studies, he has spent an inordinate amount of time writing about impotence, as if it were the worst possible thing that could happen to a man. I don’t want to know what he thinks about impotence! Who cares? And who cares about impotency, anyway? I mean, okay, if it’s permanent, it’s bad, but if someone has an occasional off day, how is it the end of the world? People aren’t machinery. We have ups and downs. Get over it. Seriously, how insecure can you be?

Maybe the problem is that men know that 95% of women tell every woman they know about every sexual failure their men experience. Another thing I don’t understand.

Somehow I got here, from writing about Obama and Putin.

The two big things that made an impression on me today were a) the Russian Embassy gets in Twitfights on a very low level, and b) the president of the United States and Vladimir Putin had a dispute, and Putin, not the president, took the high road. Okay, yes, the Russian Embassy people were childish, but Putin’s own handling of the situation was shrewd.

More and more, the world is coming to resemble Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, a movie in which everyone is stupid, and all discourse takes place on the Internet-comment level. Our discourse is nearly in that state. It’s obscene, hateful, and dumb. We used to confine that kind of thing to locker rooms, but now the situation is reversed. It’s like the whole world is a locker room, and to get away from it, you have to go into a special shelter.

Here’s a look at the near future. The language is horrible, so don’t click if you don’t want to hear it. Mike Judge was trying to be outrageous when he wrote this, but I think we’re about ten years away from this scenario.

It may turn out that some or all of the people Obama banished were spies. So what? Isn’t every embassy full of spies? I thought we all knew that. You create a system in which diplomats have freedom to travel and can’t be prosecuted for crimes, and suddenly, some of them turn out to be spies. Shocking! A leader who wasted an opportunity to make his spies immune to prosecution would be remiss.

It will be very interesting to see what happens when Trump takes office. Apart from the predictable “protests” [riots], I mean. Will he bring us an age of profitable cooperation with Putin, or will Putin play him like he played Obama? I don’t know what to expect. As long as Trump appoints conservative judges, looks out for Christians and Jews, and protects Israel, I won’t have anything to complain about. In fact, I’ll feel like thanking God on my knees every day.

I can’t help wanting to root for Putin. I know how irrational that is. I don’t know if anyone but Obama could make me feel this way. The man is a disgrace.

I guess I’ll check Twitter from time to time, purely for entertainment purposes. It’s like watching a food fight in a mental ward. And our new culture of perpetual offense makes it even more lively. Steve Martin just got reamed out for calling Carrie Fisher “beautiful.” You have to wonder what kind of craziness is next.

If you want to rise above the insanity, get to know the Holy Spirit. Our “civilization” is on its last legs. You need to have something more solid to rely on.

That’s it for now. I need to go lie down in a dark room for about half an hour.