The Alliance Defense Fund and the Liberty Legal Institute have filed suit against the Plano, Texas Independent School District for removing Baby Jesus from their unholy “Winter Festival.” Disturbingly, the Department of Justice, in violation of the time-honored tenet separating Church and State, has agreed to investigate the situation. Shouldn’t the plaintiffs complain to the Pope instead of calling the cops? How is it that fundamentalist conservatives can rail against our litigious, humanistic society then deploy a phalanx of lawyers every time they are offended by the particulars of a roadside manger display? Uh, Joseph shouldn’t be touching Mary and the goats appear less than reverent. Tort reform my ass.

The reason, of course, that the media blathers on about any of this is because it’s that time of year again. In my house we call it “Chranukah.” Not as a result of any religious admixture but because we puff a little chronic before hitting the mall. But this year I’ve noticed that sales clerks in stores like Macy’s and the GAP aren’t calling it anything at all. Management directives have constrained them to welcoming customers with a nebulous “Happy Holidays” or an undifferentiated “Seasons Greetings.” And this has Bill O’Reilly (“Santa, can I have a little vibrator shaped like a falafel?”) and the folks at the Family Research Council protesting that the liberal secularists have taken Christ out of Christmas. Huh. Maybe that’s why people are left to write “Merry X-mas” on the bottom of their cards.

Over in Missouri, Lisa Montgomery took it upon herself to reenact the Immaculate Conception. There she butchered one Bobbie Jo Stinnet and carved out her 8-month-old fetus. On the way back to Kansas, the baby was wrapped in swaddling clothes and visited by three men bearing gifts from the local auto parts store. But before you beatify Montgomery for her originality, remember that the very same stunt was attempted in Oklahoma last year. Unfortunately, in that case, the fetus had gestated a paltry six months and died before the donkey could be draped with a pancho.

Even President Bush is consumed by this biblical lore: he seeks to reincarnate himself as some kind of mid-East savoir, crucifying our military personnel in an attempt to spread freedom and voter fraud across the region. Thank God those in uniform have finally caught on. Army Spc. Thomas Wilson voiced his displeasure at being sent to slaughter (read: deployed to Iraq) during a Rumsfeld visit to a Kuwaiti staging area. When Wilson pointedly asked, “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?” 2300 soldiers stood and cheered. Despite an unlimited budget and two years to plan the invasion, Rumsfeld coldly replied, “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have.”

Well, either way, our armed forces will be light by a third of the 5,000 Ready Reservists called to duty. Many are refusing to report because they already received their discharge certificates. “I thought my time was up,” claimed one retired soldier, “but now they’re telling me that it’s not.” Although not delineated in any enlistment contract, any officer who does not relinquish his commission after an eight-year stint remains at the Pentagon’s beck and call. Mark Waple, a West Point grad and former judge advocate general, argues, “It borders on being a deceptive recruiting practice.” He notes that the secret provision is buried cryptically in the fine print: “It’s a six-digit reference to an Army regulation, that’s put in a remark section of these agreements.”

Slumping morale – especially since a cover up failed to conceal that stupidity, not the Taliban, killed NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman – forced Rummy’s hasty return to the theatre of operations. This time he actually ventured into Iraq, visiting soldiers wounded in Tuesday’s bloody mess hall explosion. At first, the carnage (22 killed) was believed a missile attack, but later credited to a suicide bomber. Further investigation, however, has definitively pinpointed the rather unlikely source: A Christmas Eve turkey. In fact, it was the same plastic bird President Bush paraded around the Baghdad airport during last Thanksgiving’s photo op. Short on supplies (amazing, no?) military food service specialists were forced to sculpt the ersatz foul from 12 pounds of C-4 explosive. When an unwitting chef placed the turkey near an ungrounded toaster, well… BOOM! But no worries, as Rummy pressed the (remaining bits of) flesh at a combat surgical hospital in Mosul. Inexplicably, soldiers seemed to genuinely welcome the Secretary. Pfc. Malloy Hilber’s spirits were visibly lifted by the visit. He raised a damaged leg and beamed, “Mr. Rumsfeld took a picture with me and even signed my cast.” One can only imagine the abject despair that will visit Hilber and several of his co-survivors when they discover that the autographs were rendered by a mechanical auto-pen and not by the hand of Rummy himself.