The Daily News' War Against Philly's War On German Christmas

Philadelphia's City Hall finally capitulated in the War on Christmas, and thank goodness. The end of the "controversy" means that today should be the last day we get saturation coverage of the "controversy" -- like, say, the Daily News' three opinion columnists lambasting officials for getting the "controversy" started in the first place. Luckily, all three columnists played precisely to type, indicating that you probably never have to read them again in order to know their feelings on a given subject.

Stu Bykofsky, of course, went the Muslim-blaming route: "If the words "Christmas Village" offend you, what is the basis of your offense? Are you anti-Christian? Remember those offended by the "Ground Zero mosque"? Their feelings didn't win out. Oh, that's different. Islam is a minority religion here, but it's OK to disrespect a majority religious belief."

Michael Smerconish went with dripping sarcasm: "And that creche they moved from the front of the Municipal Services Building to the JFK Plaza is what, just some baby bunking down in the hay? And how about that "holiday tree" set to be lit this afternoon? I haven't seen it, but something tells me it's not a bonsai or a fig. Maybe it's part of Mayor Nutter's Greenworks Philadelphia sustainability plan. And the Nat King Cole classics providing the village's soundtrack? Maybe the city can get the name of "The Christmas Song" changed to "The Winter Number.""

Christine Flowers let loose with pure rage against political correctness and a bit of Philly-hating: "IF SANTA HADN'T already been turned off by this city after getting pelted with snowballs at Franklin Field way back when, Mayor Nutter has guaranteed that he'll be avoiding this mediocre metropolis like the plague on a permanent basis. ... I didn't think that Philadelphia's warped experiment with diversity could sink any lower than the subterranean depths it reached with the crusade against the Boy Scouts. Was I ever wrong. The City of Brotherly Love had decided to show a little less love toward the roughly 75 percent of its citizens who celebrate a holiday that has, at its core, the principle of peace. I'm sure that made the remaining 25 percent happy, but was it really worth it?"

No. I'm pretty sure I can speak for all of us when I say it wasn't.

Bag O' Books: Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom"

Three thoughts about Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom":

* I tried something different with this novel, listening to it on audiobook. There are probably better choices for an audiobook than the longest prominent novel of the last year. It took me two months to listen to the whole thing. Forever. I discovered that audiobooks rob you of time to read a passage, then stare out the window and think: The audio moves forward whether or not your attention does. On the other hand: scenes involving phone sex and a character's feces had extra potency in an audio format -- almost vomit-inducing, in fact. The narrator's attempt at accents? Cringeworthy. On balance, I wish I'd read the book instead of listened to it.

* The book, while well-written, is made a bit wearying by Franzen's apparent need to have Something Important To Say about the Bush Era we've all just recently lived through. It makes for distracting fiction, and it makes you wish that Franzen -- an accomplished essayist -- would've just written a collection of magazine columns, instead of placing his fictional adulterous housewives and angry rock stars among real events. Instead of bringing us closer to his characters, it distanced me -- a reminder that everything I was reading (hearing) wasn't real. The suspension of disbelief is still important in fiction, especially when (like Franzen) one is aspiring to old-school traditional storytelling instead of formal innovation.

* The other distraction: Two men in the book believe that the novel's central female character, Patty, is a remarkable woman. But there's precious little evidence that she is remarkable. She played basketball well in the 1980s. She finally got around to reading serious books a few years ago. She writes as well as Jonathan Franzen does, but we're the only ones who know that. Other than that, though, she seems thoroughly unexceptional. It's impossible to imagine the hold she has on the two main male characters in the book, and that makes much of the resulting action less believable and less weighty.

* BONUS THOUGHT: In the end, everybody gets a happy ending. But it doesn't seem earned. In fact, the happy endings that the characters get -- one gets rich selling shade-grown coffee -- seems at odds with Franzen's carefully detailed satire at the beginning of the book, in which one long paragraph lays bare the shallowness and banality of every yuppie goal ever. "Freedom" ends with its characters actually achieving bourgeois goals like the ones it lampooned, only without the irony, making it feel like Franzen is selling out to the very forces he seemingly understood so well. All in all, a very frustrating novel.

Bill Simmons: Possibly A Bad Dad

Bill Simmons' love of Boston teams and hatred of the LA Lakers is usually amusing, but his campaign to keep his daughter from becoming a Lakers fan seems psychopathic:

"The big strategic play? Lying. Sorry, I had to. This was important. I convinced her that the Lakers were bullies (she hates the concept of bullying; it drives her crazy in movies), that Kobe is a mean daddy to his young daughters and that Phil Jackson absolutely hates golden retrievers. Did I show her the Artest melee on YouTube, then point out Artest in a Lakers uniform and tell her that she couldn't root for the Lakers because Artest might run into the stands and punch me during a game? Yes. Yes I did. The only time I screwed up? When I tried to convince her that Pau Gasol was a vampire -- that made her like him more. (F***ing Edward. He swayed an entire generation of girls under 15.) Everything else worked. Everything. I killed off every possible Lakers chromosome."

Even assuming some comic license on Simmons' part, that's why I don't let myself ever become too much of a sports fan. When you start working that hard and dishonestly at swaying a child's entertainment preferences -- and that's all sports really are, right? -- the line from "fun" to "sick" has been crossed. I don't ever want my feelings about the running and jumping abilities of young men to ever affect my emotional outlook, or my parenting. Especially my parenting.

John McCain's DADT Legacy

Fred Kaplan at Slate: "The evidence, the polling data of service men and women, the testimony of senior officers, the everyday experiences of living and fighting, the imperatives of national security, as well as the obvious moral standards of contemporary life—all point to, at the very least, a shift in the burden of proof on whether DADT should be repealed. It's no longer valid, and it's clearly a pretense, to call for further studies, further surveys, closer questioning. If McCain and the others oppose repeal, they have to come up with some new reason—or fall back on the oldest, most unpalatable reason—why."

It's clear that McCain will continue to oppose the repeal of DADT. That's his right. But in doing so, he's probably cementing his legacy as the Strom Thurmond of gay civil rights.

Making It Harder To Filibuster

I like this idea:

"The public believes that filibustering senators have to hold the floor. Indeed, the public perceives the filibuster as an act of principled public courage and sacrifice. Let's make it so.

Require a specific number of Senators -- I suggest five for the first 24 hours, 10 for the second 24 hours, and 20 thereafter -- to be on the floor to sustain the filibuster. This would be required even during quorum calls. At any point, a member could call for a count of the senators on the floor who stand in opposition to the regular order, and if the count falls below the required level, the regular order prevails and a majority vote is held."

This seems like a good middle ground between the untenable status quo -- where all one senator has to do is say "filibuster" to block a bill -- and getting rid of the filibuster entirely. I don't know why it's needed, exactly: it seems to obstruct the will of the American people as expressed through their elected representatives. But senators seem loathe to let it go; perhaps they'll agree to a modification instead.

The Obama Administration's Orwellian Reaction To Wikileaks

James Fallows: "A government contractor forwards an email he received today from the Commerce Department. Its gist: just because State Department memos had been posted by Wikileaks and published in the press, that didn't mean they weren't 'classified' any more, or that there wouldn't still be penalties for quoting them. Eg: 'There has been a rumor that the information is no longer classified since it resides in the public domain. This is NOT true.'"

Fallows goes on to quote a law school official who let his students know this week that they could, someday, be deprived employment and/or security clearances with the government -- or government-related work -- if they post links to the Wikileaks material, or comment about it on social media sites. In other words: the Obama Administration's response to Wikileaks is to make sure that aspiring members of the establishment officially pretend the Wikileaks release never happened. Every day brings me one more step toward becoming a weirdo libertarian.

Is Julian Assange A Terrorist?

I was going to write about this, but TNC got there first:

"I think there actually is something talismanic about designating Assange a terrorist--politically talismanic. I think we're getting close to a point where 'terrorist' indicates a certain view of your enemies, as opposed to a statement of tactics. I have mixed feelings about the Wikileaks dump, mostly because I don't really see any great scandals, atrocities, or cover-ups being exposed. Assange oeuvre is mostly hacker, and occasionally, accidentally humanitarian. 

But in no real sense of the word is Assange a terrorist, except in the sense that 'terrorists' are people who we have come to see as belonging outside of our justice system, miscreants somewhere in the range of child molesters."