And see also, at Whistling in the Light, “When Christmas Gets Messy”.
The Gift
Trees and lights and bells and carols;
Bright-wrapped packages, piled high;
Winter’s sharp blow joins the heralds:
“Christmas-time is nigh!”
Mailmen hurry; shoppers scurry;
Time is fleeing – Oh! So fast!
Parties gather, loud and merry,
Grander than in Christmas’ past.
Pause a moment to remember
That a Savior’s simple birth
Still stirs angel wings in susur’ –
“Peace to men; good will on earth!”
Now the Father’s hands that molded
The first Adam in the clay,
Gently ’round a manger folded,
Cradle a Baby in the hay.
So the Greatest Gift extended,
Gift of love and peace to all,
“God’s great love to man descended”
Calls us to a manger stall.
©1990 David Needham
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Submitted to Adam’s Carnival of Christmas
This is a piece (already posted at Whistling in the Light) that I’ve used in several different ways over the years. I had planned a much more elaborate Christmas post—including a quasi-pod-cast-y sorta “report from the fields near Bethlehem” thing— but instead, I think I’ll take bits and pieces and post them throughout Advent, up through Christmas.
NOTE: bumped to Christmas Eve and updated with the Carnival of Christmas URL
Barbarians Find an Ally in MMP
Ahh! I just discovered why I wasn’t able to easily insert links! blogger.com requires Internet Exploder for wysiwg, Rich Text, etc., editing. Can’t use a standards-compliant browser, but must inst3ead use the least secure, clunkiest thing available.
Oh. Well. It’s free. Ya get what ya pay for, eh? At least it’s a lil faster than wrangling with inserting the html into the template. It’s pretty much like using Outlook Express to edit Rich Text email. (Another “get what ya pay for… “)
On the Civilization War front…
Barbarians Find an Ally in MMP
The under-reporting of successes in Iraq, the over-reporting of conflict, giving Kedwards a pass on sliming our Iraqi and other coalition allies by Mass Media Podpeople are all evidence that the barbarians we are fighting in the Civilization War have firm allies in American Mass Media Podpeople.
Yeh, yeh, I know good news is no news at all and bad news sells. Well, that’s baloney. Bad news sells because Mass Media Podpeople hawk bad news day and night. When all the school cafeteria has is baloney sandwiches, that’s what the kids’ll buy… until they start bringing their own lunches.
Fortunately, Civilization has a set of media allies, by no means as strong yet as the Mass Media Podpeople’s Army but still growing: the blogosphere, email warriors and a few, very few, acting almost as a fifth column within the ranks of the Mass Media Podpeople’s Army.
Is it a Reactionary Revolution or a Revolutionary Reaction in response to the blatant dishonesty of Mass Media Podpeople, as recently evidenced by CBS’ Dan Blather? I dunno, but it’s a good thing that no few people are “mad as hell” and “not going to take it any more”…
Lies, damned lies and CBS-quality “reporting”
By now you’ve probably heard the cannard that Cheney said Iraq was responsible for 9/11. The MSM (main stream media, or, as I prefer, mass media podpeople) have been going ape over this lie, based on a Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert on September 14. In fact, many of them have been showing a clip they say has Cheney saying that very thing.
Not so. You can look it up yourself (the transcript is online here), but here’s the part from the September 14, 2003 Meet the Press quote that the MSM, and their partners-in-crime in the Democrat party, disingenuously clip to create their lie…
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VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim, we can do what we have to do to prevail in this conflict. Failure’s not an option. And go back again and think about what’s involved here. This is not just about Iraq or just about the difficulties we might encounter in any one part of the country in terms of restoring security and stability. This is about a continuing operation on the war on terror. And it’s very, very important we get it right. If we’re successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it’s not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it’s not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11. They understand what’s at stake here. That’s one of the reasons they’re putting up as much of a struggle as they have, is because they know if we succeed here, that that’s going to strike a major blow at their capabilities.
MR. RUSSERT: So the resistance in Iraq is coming from those who were responsible for 9/11?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, I was careful not to say that. With respect to 9/11, 9/11, as I said at the beginning of the show, changed everything. And one of the things it changed is we recognized that time was not on our side, that in this part of the world, in particular, given the problems we’ve encountered in Afghanistan, which forced us to go in and take action there, as well as in Iraq, that we, in fact, had to move on it. The relevance for 9/11 is that what 9/11 marked was the beginning of a struggle in which the terrorists come at us and strike us here on our home territory. And it’s a global operation. It doesn’t know national boundaries or national borders.
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Thx to Polpundit for checking the facts.