PROGRESSIVES CANCEL LEGENDARY PROGRESSIVE ICON: Adieu, Teddy Roosevelt.

I think it is a pity that the Traveling Racism Outrage Mob (TROM) has it in for Teddy Roosevelt. I agree with President Trump who, when he heard the news, tweeted “Ridiculous, don’t do it!” Quite right. For one thing, TROM could learn some useful life lessons from Teddy Roosevelt. Although there is much in his progressive politics with which I disagree, I greatly admire him for his character and determination. A sickly boy, plagued by asthma, he nonetheless devoted himself to the “strenuous life” and achieved great things. Above all, he did not whine.

That is one thing our professional anti-racists and identity-politics ideologues — especially feminists — could learn with profit: stop whining about how unfair life is to you and do something to improve your lot. You would thus make everyone around you happier, and you would be happier yourself.

Teddy Roosevelt also had a deep social-political message that our generation, especially paid-up members of TROM, should rediscover. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

He was thinking of the habit of calling recent immigrants Italian-American or Irish-Americans or German-Americans. He was dead set against this practice of coining “hyphenated Americans.” He would not have been surprised to discover that the lowly hyphen was a potent weapon in the divisive armory of multiculturalism and identity politics. When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive. There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation. The hyphen does not mean “American, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.” It means “only provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.”

Will any “Progressive” journalist confront Hillary Clinton about her longtime allegiance to this now toxic figure?

● Shot: “I think that Teddy Roosevelt was a great American.”

—Hillary Clinton in a May 1, 2008 interview with Bill O’Reilly.

● Double-Shot: “It’s time to take a page from Teddy Roosevelt’s book and get our economy working for Americans again. That’s what I’ll do as president.”

—Hillary, as quoted in an October 28, 2015 Dow Jones Marketwatch.com article titled “Hillary Clinton wants to be Teddy Roosevelt.”

● Hangover:

DON’T GET COCKY: Democratic pollster: ‘Big Republican advantage going into 2022.’

THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! CNN Now Openly Questioning President Biden’s Mental Health.

AMERICA’S KULAK CLASS: Horrific Prison Conditions for January 6 Republicans “Treated as Subhuman” Predicted by Abe Lincoln in 1860.

GET IN SHAPE: WALITO Resistance Bands Set. #CommissionEarned

KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE: Surprising Academic Data on What Happens When Kids Learn the Truth About Santa.

Carl Anderson and Norman Prentice, psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, recruited 52 families with elementary school-aged children and interviewed both parents and kids about the family’s experience of Santa Claus. What they found was surprising: “Children reported predominantly positive reactions on learning the truth.

Parents, however, described themselves as predominantly sad in reaction to their child’s discovery…While children experience distressful reactions such as sadness, disappointment and anger, the degree of such reactions are generally minimal and short-lived.” In fact, they were so unperturbed that 58 percent said they pretended to believe in Santa after realizing the truth—so as not to disappoint their parents.

How do children react to learning the truth?

“Children generally reported far greater occurrence of positive and negative feelings than did the parents…While reporting a wide range of feelings experienced, other data suggest that the intensity of feeling as recalled by the child was not excessive…Children who discovered the truth from their parents were, contrary to prediction, no more distressed than those who learned on their own.”

How do parents react to their kids’ discovery?

“Parents were asked to describe how they felt after their child found out the truth about Santa Claus. Sadness (40%) was the most frequently described parental feeling in relation to the event which symbolized the child’s continued maturation…Only 6% of parents indicated that they were happy or glad.”

If only people were so responsive to learning that political myths they believed in are not true.

A READER SENDS THIS: “EVEN IN DEEPEST MASSACHUSETTS.”

The #Resistance is everywhere.

Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

HAPPY BOXING DAY!

AN ADMISSION OF IMPOTENCE: Biden Turns to Antitrust Enforcers to Combat Inflation.

IRONY CAN BE AWFULLY IRONIC SOMETIMES: Antifa Members Sue Journalist for ‘Stealing’ Their Public Comments. It Doesn’t Go Well for Them.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: The Mankato School Board in Minnesota voted unanimously for a new policy that allows non-white teachers exclusively to be eligible for “additional stipends,” and for teachers to be segregated by race.

MUSKOGEE’S LOCAL HERO:  Sixth grader has a busy day rescuing neighbors.

FLASHBACK: “You’re just the best. Thank you.”

CHILDREN GO WHERE I SEND THEE.

SELF-PARODY DEPARTMENT: MSNBC columnist: We need to cancel the NORAD Santa tracker.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: A U.S. Navy combat ship is stranded in Guantánamo Bay with a virus outbreak. “A Navy combat ship deployed to intercept drug trafficking in the Caribbean and East Pacific is stuck in the port at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with a coronavirus outbreak among its fully vaccinated crew.”

OPEN THREAD: Joyeux Noel.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:  Home For Christmas, Complete Short Story.

HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS: I’ve posted a lot of different versions of this song. It means a lot to me, for no better reason than that when I was a kid, our only Christmas record was a promotional album that had been given out by the old Pure Oil Company (“Be Sure With Pure!”), where my grandfather worked. It had Frank Sinatra singing the title tune, of course (the old 1947 version, with the “muddle through somehow” line, which was probably cheaper for Pure Oil), along with Christmas songs by all sorts of artists I’d never heard of, like Jo Stafford and the Hi-Los. But it somehow came to symbolize Christmas to me, and especially that song, which on adult listening just gets better.

Some background on the song here.

Hope you’ve all had yourselves a merry little Christmas.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Through the years, we all will be together, if the fates allow.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Faithful friends, who are dear to us.

G.K. CHESTERTON BELIEVED IN SANTA CLAUS:

He wants the child “to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still a part of the land in which he will live.” He wants the child to “pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children.”

For Chesterton, that “harmless borderland” includes Santa Claus. I think that’s more problematic than he saw. But whatever it includes, we need to find it. It is the place children see what we need to see, where they find joys in the world that point to the eternal joys.

He suggests the reason in his book on the painter and poet William Blake, one of his earliest books. The “spiritualist,” the man who pursues spirits because they’re spirits, “has to know his gods before he loves them. But a man ought to love his gods before he is sure that there are any. … If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact?”

What as a child we saw dimly, in natural fantasies, we should see as an adult. We must not go blind by giving it up, as atheists do, but grow up by seeing it clearly. To put in biblical terms: we must become as little children as part of growing into the full stature of Christ.

Read the whole thing.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, TO YOU.

NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: Nobody’s Child: The Young Squire.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Let your heart be light.