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From the New York Times on New Year’s Eve:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

Read the whole editorial here.

The “men” the editorial references were all lawyers. Alberto Gonzales, then counselor to the president, David Addington, counsel to the Vice President, and counsel to the National Security Agency met with the CIA to discuss the destruction of evidence amounting to obstruction of justice and subversion of the checks and balances of the Constitution. Even if not indicted by a world court for war crimes, even if not indicted for their criminal acts by an American court, these men must be disbarred, in my opinion, for bringing the profession into disrepute.

I can’t sit idle while evil triumphs. Something must be done. As John Goodman’s character keeps repeating in “The Big Lebowski”, this cannot stand. I hate these guys.

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happy birthday Mike and Dan. Love you guys. Many many many more.

The results are official:

The card sharps, layabouts and miscreants at the Edgemere Casino bilked, cheated and otherwise unfairly deprived me of $5.15 of hard earned cash last night. If it weren’t for the $6.28 in goodies I consumed, “comped”, I would consider seeking a federal investigation.

The bloodthirsty bastards are going to see an inspirational film today: Sweeney Todd. No meat pie for me, thanks.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Macy’s has decided to close Oklahoma City’s store in Crossroads Mall. Here’s the whole story, but if you haven’t spent all your Christmas money yet, you may want to wait for the closeout prices sure to come in a few weeks.

Hear a good one lately?

I’d personally like to hear a good one. One good idea about what the U.S. should do about Pakistan now that we’ve gone “all in” on Bhutto and she’s dead and the Islamic nuclear bomb sits on a much more slippery foundation. Just one, if you please. It seems to me that this administration is proved that there are no depths of incompetence to which it cannot drop, so I’m real optimistic about how this will all turn out. Part of the trouble is that there’s so little the U.S. actually CAN do. One stinking thing is an almost absolute certainty: the tribal territories of Pakistan that border Afghanistan will be able to assist the Taliban in Afghanistan with impunity, so we’d best get ready for that. I know that I personally took the principled course and went to see “Charlie Wilson’s War”. Julia Roberts is charming but never met a big-hair Houston big money momma, Tom Hanks doesn’t know how to play a cocaine and whiskey addled carousing Texas conservative, and P.S.Hoffman — well, I’m blaming Mike Nichols and wish he’d been 35 when he directed this movie. It’s a good film, but it also fails on many levels.

Gazing into the crystal ball

The following political prediction about the Iowa caucus/primary is provided to you by “gut check” accuracy. I’ve made a W.A.G., and here it is:

GOP:

Romney 24%
McCain 23%
Huckabee 21%
Ron Paul 17%
Guiliani 11%
Thompson 4%

Dem.:

Hillary 27.5%
Edwards 27%
Obama 26.5%
Richardson 9%
Biden 7%
Dodd 2%
Kucinich 1%

The New Hampshire primary a few days later is impossible to predict because there are so many undecideds and the effect of Iowa can’t be foretold, but what the hell?, it’s not like I have a national reputation to worry about, so here goes:

GOP

Romney 29%
McCain 27%
Guiliani 20%
Huckabee 13%
Ron Paul 8%
Thompson 3%

Dem.

Obama 28%
Hillary 26%
Edwards 24%
Richardson 10%
Biden 7%
Dodd 3%
Kucinich 2%

In other words, not much is going to clear up about the nominations until Feb.5 and the vote in South Carolina. When the S.C. vote comes down, Edwards and Guiliani will both need a win to stay in and that is easier for the southern Edwards than for the N.Y. Guiliani, although the Nation’s Mayor will do better with S.C. military families than most will expect. If Guiliani and Thompson leave, that helps McCain beat Romney on “Super Tuesday”. If Edwards and Richardson leave, that will help Obama against Hillary.

Of course, when W declares martial law and suspends elections just like his buddy Musharref in Pakistan, all that will become moot.

See you in the “retraining” camps, boys and girls!

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By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN
Published: December 25, 2007
The New York Times
ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?

Well, it’s a New York story.

In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the message of Jesus’s humble birth.

But today’s chubby Santa is not about giving to the poor. He has had his saintly garb stripped away. The filling out of the figure, the loss of the vestments, and his transformation into a beery fellow smoking a pipe combined to form a caricature of Dutch peasant culture. Eventually this Magic Santa (a suitable patron saint if there ever was one for the burgeoning capitalist machinery of the city) was of course popularized by the Manhattanite Clement Clarke Moore published in “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” in The Troy (New York) Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823.

The newly created deity Santa soon attracted a school of iconographers: notable among them were Thomas Nast, whose 1863 image of a red-suited giant in Harper’s Weekly set the tone, and Haddon Sundblom, who drew up the archetypal image we know today on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. This Santa was regularly accompanied by the flying reindeer: godlike in his majesty and presiding over the winter darkness like Odin the sky god returned.

The new Santa also acquired a host of Nordic elves to replace the small dark-skinned boy called Black Peter, who in Christian tradition so loved St. Nicholas that he traveled with him everywhere. But, some might say, wasn’t it better to lose this racially stereotyped relic? Actually, no, considering the real St. Nicholas first came into contact with Peter when he raided the slave market in his hometown and railed against the trade. The story tells us that when the slavers refused to take him seriously, he used the church’s funds to redeem Peter and gave the boy a job in the church.

And what of the throwing of the bags of gold down the chimney, where they landed in the stockings and little shoes that had been hung up to dry by the fireplace? Charming though it sounds, it reflected the deplorable custom, still prevalent in late Roman society when the Byzantine church was struggling to establish the supremacy of its values, of selling surplus daughters into bondage. This was a euphemism for sexual slavery — a trade that still blights our world.

As the tale goes, Nicholas had heard that a father in the town planned to sell his three daughters because his debts had been called in by pitiless creditors. As he did for Black Peter, Nicholas raided his church funds to secure the redemption of the girls. He dropped the gold down the chimney to save face for the impoverished father.

This tale was the origin of a whole subsequent series of efforts among the Christians who celebrated Nicholas to make some effort to redeem the lot of the poor — especially children, who always were, and still are, the world’s front-line victims. Such was the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends.

I like St. Nicholas. You can keep chubby Santa.

John Anthony McGuckin is a professor of religious history at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia.