The above-quoted headline came from the right-winger website Drudge Report. Drudge is an outstanding new aggregator website, just so long as you realize that the selection of linked stories and (even more importantly) the particular "headlines" written by Matt Drudge result from his right-winger slant and persuasion. So it's always necessary to go past the Drudge headline and retrieve and scrutinize closely the underlying story -- because Drudge's "headlines" often tell little of the full story.Take as Exhibit 1 the above headline from over the weekend: "Members of Congress barred from saying 'Merry Christmas in mailings." Sounds like more leftist 20 percenter political correctness bullshit run amok, no? Only problem: Reading the underlying story (link at bottom), this ban appears to have nothing to do with any chickenshit leftist P.C. measures.
Instead, the U.S. House has a policy against members sending out official mailings (i.e. ones paid for by government monies) referring to any specific holiday. For example, they can't even say "Happy New Year" in an official mailing. The policy behind this? As best as I can tell, they don't want members trying to curry favor with constituents by sending "birthday, anniversary, wedding, birth, retirement or condolence messages and holiday greetings" on the government's dime.
That would seem to make a certain degree of sense since their opponents in election years certainly have no ability to use government funds to send out these types of targeted mailings. But even if you think the ban seems fairly petty or trivial (and you may have a decent point), I support this ban for entirely different reasons:In the fiscal nightmare that is our federal government and Congress, with a current national debt of somewhere around $15 trillion (I've lost count of the exact figure), and with neither party appearing overly concerned or serious about making the cuts necessary to start cutting down that debt, the last thing these slimeball politicians on both sides need to be spending our taxpayer dollars on are costly mass mailings of holiday greetings to constituents. (How's that for a really long run-on sentence?!)
So regardless of what you think about the reasons behind the House's ban on these mailings, the end result comes out in the right place. And it's not an "ends justifies the means" scenario for me, since the premise behind the ban (as explained above) seems at least defensible and is not apparently based on any sort of alleged leftist 20 percenter disdain for Christmas references.
Besides, it appears that if any Congressmen really do have a strong heart's desire to send out a mass mailing of Christmas greetings to constituents, they have every ability to do so -- just so long as they pay for it themselves. Knock yourselves out with that, if you want, you scuzjob House members in both parties. Just expect the one that I receive to go straight into the rubbish bin.
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