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:

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.

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

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.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! LOL: Biden Tricked Into Agreeing With ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ During NORAD Event.

On Friday, Joe and Jill Biden did a video call into NORAD to see where Santa is. After speaking with some kids, a father said to the Bidens: “I hope you guys have a wonderful Christmas as well. Merry Christmas and Let’s go Brandon.”

“Let’s go, Brandon. I agree,” Biden said in response.

Luckily for us, the event was live-streamed and we have the video.

This will end well:

UPDATE: And we’re off, with Reuters first out of the gate! “Much about the Christmas Eve exchange was not immediately clear, including what the caller intended, why Biden repeated the slogan and whether either knew the origin of the phrase. The White House did not respond to requests seeking comment. Jared’s full name and contact information were not immediately available.”

Give the DNC-MSM time; it will be. Just ask the rodeo clown who was fired for mocking Joe’s former boss.

More: The DNC-MSM always gets their man: Oregon father of four who told President Biden ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ on Christmas Eve call said he meant it in jest.

The Oregonian filing this story under the “Public Safety” category is the perfect Orwellian touch to send a warning to anyone else who dares attempt to talk back to their would-be rulers. (At least when he has a “D” after his name.)

(Updated and bumped.)

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why is Japan obsessed with Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas?

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Merry Xmas Edition.

PETER HITCHENS: The last Noël in the USSR.

By the time we went to live there, at the end of the Gorbachev era, the festival was no longer actually banned in Soviet Moscow. Young Pioneers no longer patrolled the wintry streets searching for subversive Christmas trees, as they had done in the early years of the Leninist state. The air no longer trembled with the sound of cathedrals being dynamited, or of great bells being torn from their towers and spitefully smashed, as it had done in Stalin’s day. There were even attempts to restore some of the many Orthodox churches and monasteries desecrated and befouled by use as warehouses or reformatories.

The League of the Militant Godless, once a huge semi-official organization dedicated to mockery and hatred of God, of priests and believers, had quietly vanished during the war against Hitler. God had, during that odd period, proved a useful Comrade, at least as long as the war went on. He had been exiled and canceled again since, but not with quite the same scorn as before.

In any case, our western nativity festival was far too early for those remaining Russians who had somehow managed to cling to faith during the long decades of murder, desecration, intimidation and outright persecution. Orthodox Christmas, still governed by a more ancient calendar than ours, falls in early January. And in 1990, an Anglican Christmas in the Soviet capital was still a personal matter. St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, in Victorian times the center of a thriving English community on the very borders of western civilization, was still at that time requisitioned by a cold-hearted atheist government, and forced to serve as a state-run recording studio. So it was just us and a tatty copy of the 1662 Prayer Book.

The Kremlin had sought, fairly successfully, to blot out all recollection of the birth of Our Savior from normal life, especially among children. Instead it had encouraged a huge celebration of the New Year, just a few days before the Orthodox Nativity. Stalin had even abandoned his original attempt to eradicate the Russian Santa Claus, a hard-drinking, white-bearded character called Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) and his female subordinate, the Snow Maiden. People liked them too much, so the Communist Party had repurposed them to serve the new order. They were absorbed into the Atheist New Year festivities, including a communist New Year tree that looked suspiciously like a Christmas tree, unless adorned with an official red star.

The New Year feast was all-encompassing, impressive and impossible to ignore. The street on which we lived was an immensely wide avenue built for giants. It roared day and night with dirty, spluttering vehicles, its center lane much used by the Politburo’s huge, snarling limousines. Yet even this highway fell silent for the holiday. And in that dark city, it was astonishing to see the festive lights switched on, making it, for a few brief hours, as bright as a western capital. But this was not our celebration. It was its enemy. I have disliked the New Year heartily ever since.

Read the whole thing.

Related: The National Socialists Fought the Original War on Christmas.

And speaking of the Brothers Hitchens: Hitch-21: If Christopher Hitchens were alive today.

BREAKING: Santa Is Real and Covid Isn’t Stopping Him From Coming.

“IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?” Media Myth Alert: Getting it right about a legendary newspaper editorial.

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Piers Morgan dismantled cancel culture for ‘ruining’ Christmas: ‘Sucking joy out of life.’

Beloved Christmas song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” which was written by Frank Loesser and popularised in the 40s film “Neptune’s Daughter”, has caused controversy in the past decade. The song, which has been covered by world-famous crooners such as Dean Martin, has faced criticism among some listeners for the alleged implications of its lyrics. The male vocal part’s unrelenting pressure for the female to “stay” despite repeated suggestions she should go home have been described in certain quarters as suggestive of sexual harassment.

The first time the song was widely criticised for its lyrics was 12 years ago.

Then, in 2018 “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was cancelled by a number of radio stations in Canada and the US after social media criticism and public pressure.

In a throwback episode of Good Morning Britain, Mr Morgan was apoplectic about efforts to ban the song, and suggested that cancel culture was “sucking the joy out of life”.

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2014:

A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the US had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:

The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as introduced by Esther Williams in “Neptune’s Daughter.” Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11 to the brief Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to the Islamic State marching across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Qutb’s view of the West is the merest extension of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.

I’m a reasonable chap, and I’d be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot. But you’ll have to pry “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would be very cold indeed.

Indeed.™

ONE OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’S FUNNIER 21st CENTURY SEGMENTS: 2005’s Christmastime For The Jews.  “Just watch it. And you don’t have to be Jewish. My WASP husband gets almost every joke.”

Related:

ANALYSIS: TRUE. France is Bacon.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Santa Claus Converts To Calvinism, Moves Everybody To Naughty List.

FIVE UNKNOWN FACTS ABOUT WASHINGTON’S CROSSING THE DELAWARE ON CHRISTMAS DAY.

QUESTION ASKED: Charlie Brown’s Inside Job. What gives the 1965 Peanuts special its staying power?

“EVERY WEEK IT’S LIKE PLAYING ALABAMA IN THE NFL:” The 10 Moments That Define Urban Meyer’s Disastrous Jaguars Tenure.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND RADICAL CHIC, THE GERITOL YEARS: Donor withholds $4.5 million from Chicago school until former terrorist prof. is fired. “A Chicago businessman is withholding $4.5 million in donations from the University of Illinois (UI) Urbana-Champaign until the school agrees to get rid of former domestic terrorist and convicted murderer James Kilgore.”

RIP: Eve Babitz, a Hedonist With a Notebook, Is Dead at 78. A child of Hollywood, she wrote of the sensuous pleasures of Los Angeles, and sampled them enthusiastically.

At 23, she spent a year in New York, made miserable by its shabby grayness, working for a time at an alternative Village paper. She also introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí and worked as a secretary for a Madison Avenue ad salesman.

Ms. Babitz would go on to write five more books — autobiographical novels like “Sex and Rage” (1979) and “L.A. Woman” (1982), featuring her alter-egos, the lovelorn Jacaranda and Sophie — and essay collections like “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and L.A.” (1977), as well as countless magazine articles. The books sold modestly. Yet the misadventures they recounted, delivered in Ms. Babitz’s luxurious, undulating prose, were required reading for those who had a taste for deeply personal writing by female authors like her peers Nora Ephron, Cynthia Heimel and Laurie Colwin.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Shocking video shows woman armed with a pickaxe shoplifting in broad daylight at a Rite Aid in crime-ridden Los Angeles.

Related: Tom Cotton: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Tesla owner blows up his Model S with dynamite over $22,000 battery replacement (video).

BLACK AMERICANS CONTRIBUTING TO BIDEN’S TANKING POLL NUMBERS: During the campaign, Joe Biden said if you vote for Trump, then you ain’t Black. Biden and most liberal Democrats do not understand that Black voters care about the same kitchen table issues as Caucasians or any other race…As Black voters experience economic pain, their approval of the party in power—Biden and Congressional Democrats—has fallen.”

OUT ON A LIMB: Lie of the Year: ‘I Will Shut Down The Virus.’ Biden’s COVID-19 death count passes 400K.

Exit question:

JOAN DIDION, THE GREAT CONTRARIAN:

Joan Didion, who inspired a generation of young writers including this one, died Thursday. She was a lot of things, but one of them: she was a brilliant contrarian. My favorite of her pieces skewered the trendy movements around her.

When hippies were cool, where was Joan Didion? She was writing the darkest portraits of the movement that were ever made. She was showing readers the preschool-aged child whose parents gave her LSD. She went to the beating heart of the utopian progressive movement of the era–in the heart of the city where I was born and raised–and she showed what the unmooring looks like up close.

In “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” Didion gives us a hilarious take-down of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, where well-meaning young hippies wander glassy-eyed across her pages. Here’s Didion on Baez’s right hand man:

“Ira Sandperl is a forty-two-year-old native of St. Louis who has, besides the beard, a shaved head, a large nuclear-disarmament emblem on his corduroy jacket, glittering and slightly messianic eyes, a high cracked laugh and the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptible but fatally askew rainbow.”

Here on Baez: “To encourage Joan Baez to be ‘political’ is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue ‘feeling’ things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, ‘all vague.’”

She ends the piece with Baez standing in front of the refrigerator eating potato salad with her fingers.

The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.

Related: Didion on Woody Allen, at the peak of his career in 1979: “Most of us remember very well these secret signals and sighs of adolescence, remember the dramatic apprehension of our own mortality and other ‘more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,’ but eventually we realize that we are not the first to notice that people die. ‘Even with all the distractions of my work and my life,’ Woody Allen was quoted as saying in a cover story (the cover line was ‘Woody Allen Comes of Age’) in Time, ‘I spend a lot of time face to face with my own mortality.’ This is actually the first time I have ever heard anyone speak of his own life as a ‘distraction.’”