I Read Sarah Palin's New Book About the War on Christmas. Here's What I Learned.

Harper Collins



Since losing the 2008 presidential election and almost completing a full term as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has remained on the edge of the national consciousness. She's like America's racist aunt; not evil, just painfully ignorant and around the holidays she usually opens her mouth and says something embarrassing.

Her newest book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas is like her others: a delightful read if you're able to disconnect the hate part of your brain and just focus on the imaginary world she creates. It's an amusing, Seussian world, featuring combinations of real and made-up words. "Obamacare death panels." "Lamestream media." And don't forget, "Liberal militant atheist secularists", the word-salad Grinches of her holiday diatribe. Instead of stealing Christmas with a Santa suit, they use what she calls "an extreme legal technicality" and other people might call "constitutional protection against establishment of state religion."

Her inability to use words correctly illustrates perfectly her disconnection from the world. My favorite example is her heartwarming story about Christmas 2012, which fell right after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. To celebrate the event (I guess?) she bought Todd Palin a gun for Christmas, which she referred to as an act of "civil disobedience". Not only is that a hilarious re-purposing of a term with a noble history, it's also a perfect misuse of BOTH WORDS. Buying guns is both legal and dangerous, making it an act of uncivil obedience.

But words are as far as she can think. At one point she gets so frustrated trying to put together complete thoughts (or reaching her publisher-required word count) she just starts spewing random words. "I've told you the power of words, so here are some good old fashioned words: Work. Honesty. Courage. Justice. Perseverance." If only somebody had told her the power of sentences!

If sentences are hard for her, logic is completely out of the question. Good Tidings reads like an exam question in Logical Fallacies 101. One third of the book is her vision of Christmas Yet To Come, in which she details all the horrible things that have happened because we lost respect for Jesusy Christmas. "You guys, in this future that I just made up, everything is terrible! So we should change."

Um, argument ad imaginarium? Good work, Alex. 10 points.

Here's how she deals with the fact that Christmas isn't historically Christian: "Does that mean Christians won the war on Saturnalia? You bet! And that shows the power of new traditions to shape culture." This in a book about how the way Christmas is being shaped by modern culture is inherently evil!

Argument self-contradictorium? Correct! 15 points.

And most importantly, she really wants to prove that belief in God makes one good and atheism makes one evil. "It was good Christians who opposed slavery and helped end segregation." And who was opposing them? Did I miss the part where a national coalition of atheists were pushing for slavery?

This one's actually got a real name, affirming a disjunct. 25 points!

Stores need to say Merry Christmas because that's the true meaning of the season but buying things isn't the meaning of Christmas so it doesn't matter what stores say but it's really important to them that you acknowledge their religion because words matter but militant atheists shouldn't get so easily offended by some simple words like "merry Christmas".

I'm just going to call that one argument ad Palinium for 50 points and an A+.

Again, she's not evil, she's just suffering from a major case of the stupids. The fun thing about reading Palin's books is she spent her life in a town of 9,000 and she doesn't read the news. When she feels attacked by The War on Christmas, it's actually the horrible realization that other people exist laying siege to her mental walls.