You bore me so very much.

You bore me so very much.

In a tweet last week, the NRCC promoted the t-shirt, which reads “Happy Holidays is What Liberals Say” in a Comic Sans font on the front and “Merry Christmas!” on the back, for Black Friday. As of Monday, the shirt looks to have been removed from the NRCC website. The online store is still selling a t-shirt milder version that says “Not Afraid to Say ‘Merry Christmas.’”

You can't have Christmas without the War on Christmas, because if there's one thing a certain (loud) segment of America is certain of it's that the baby Jesus was born 2,000 years ago primarily to justify your own need to be a raging asshole to people. I see the Republican Party jumped aboard the asshole train nice and early this year The NRCC claims the shirt was pulled because it had sold out, not because anyone involved developed a sense of taste.

As John Avarosis points out, people who say "Happy Holidays" regularly include people other than the dreaded liberals, including Reince Priebus, George Dubya Freedom Bombs Bush, Bill O'Reilly, Fox News and the RNC themselves. (Also, too, one half of the vaunted Judeo-Christian hyphenated principles our country wuz foundered uppon, but during the months from September to December those hyphenated non-Christian types are all dismissed as practically Muslims; respect for the Jewish religion is, for most conservative Christians, a warm weather thing.)

Look, I understand where this is coming from. As I said, there are certain people who can only enjoy the holiday season if they think they are pissing other people off. If your point was to celebrate Christmas you could just wear a shirt saying Merry Christmas, but if your point is that liberals are terrible and that Christmas exists only as another reason for you to go around saying so, you buy yourself a "Happy Holidays is what liberals say" just so everybody you meet on that particular day feels just a wee bit uncomfortable to be around you, wondering if you are going to go off on one of your odd store-aisle rants about socialism again. This fills a deep-seated need in some people. You know—assholes. And assholes need shirts too.

I keep wondering if maybe we ought to make the War on Christmas a real thing, just as a farce. Non-Christians could start making an epic fuss over people saying "Merry Christmas" as if any of them actually gave a flying damn what other people say; we liberals could start printing up t-shirts saying "Merry Christmas is hate speech!" just to give some poor twit somewhere the Christmas vapors.

But that sounds like actual work, and I cannot imagine spending that much time pretending to give a damn about something that exists as outrage fodder only for a tiny minority of people for whom outrage is just as much a hobby as needlepoint or collecting potato chips that look like things. Spending the holidays (yes, there is more than one, hence the effing expression) wandering around town being obnoxious to people just does not sound like that much fun, probably because I am not an asshole.

