This Holiday Season, given the slanted shadows of terrorism, avian flu and tortured, strike-induced reruns of “John from Cincinnati” and “Cop Rock,” you’d be well served to reflect on your relationship with God, to recommit your stewardship of the environment (picture a bearded, corpulent, red-suited Al Gore ripping down your neighbor’s Christmas lights) and to rekindle your love for your fellow man.  At the same time, it is awfully handy to carry around a 2×4 with protruding nails so you can bludgeon that son of a bitch who’s trying to kipe your parking place at the mall.  Doesn’t he know how desperate you are to snag the last extant box of Aqua Dots before Janice from accounting samples the office eggnog?

And if you find nothing else in your stocking but a lump of coal, you can be grateful that the president finally,finally got something right. W deftly kept Thanksgiving airline snafus to a bare minimum this year by increasing the minimum compensation due to “bumped” ticket holders, allowing commercial aircraft to wantonly occupy military airspace and freeing TSA screeners from the burdensome task of keeping bombs off of planes. According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, security lines are palpably shorter, if only due to the fact that undercover agents have been more likely than not to smuggle aboard detonators, explosives and liquid incendiary devices.  Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) fumed, “in spite of billions of dollars and the six years the TSA has had to deploy new technology and procedures, our airlines remain vulnerable.”  True, but given our track record in Iraq (billions, years, abject failure) what else should we expect?   And while the administration’s domestic security advisor, Frances Townsend, was forced to resign in disgrace, TSA Assistant Administrator Ellen Howe remains indignant:  this isn’t exactly “news to us,” she allowed. “We don’t change security procedures in knee-jerk fashion.”   Well that’s comforting.  Yet there is a silver lining in the cloud of getting blown to smithereens at 37,000 feet; you no longer need wrestle with the moral dilemma of whether or not to eat the cobbler off the tray next to you.

Otherwise, it’s business as usual:  O.J.’s in the dock, Natalee Holloway continues to be dead and televangelists are, as always, mired in scandal. Richard Roberts, for one, stepped down as president of Oral Roberts University amid allegations he pilfered school funds for personal use. A former accountant claims that Roberts ordered him to falsify financial documents and that Roberts spent $123,000 of ministry funds to remodel his home.  Roberts also stands accused of various other forms of profligacy — like buying a stable of race horses — before God personally told him to resign: “Every ounce of my flesh” said stay, he admitted, but “the Lord said, ‘don’t do that.’ ”  And I’m inclined to believe him, because shortly thereafter the school received a $70 million pledge from Mart Green, the founder of an Oklahoma City Christian office and educational supply store chain.  Praise Jesus!

And praise Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) for bringing the investigative prowess of the Senate Finance Committee to bear on six mega-churches and their free spending ministers, including the likes of Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and Crefelo Dollar.  The IRS, noted the Senator, could revoke these churches’ tax-exempt status if it determined that the pastors’ compensation exceeded a “reasonable standard.”  It remains to be determined if all the fancy suits, ocean front homes and private jets fall under this rubric.  One government official commented that at first glance the spending seems patently excessive, but then much less so after considering that the Pope has his own fucking country.

And yet, for all that is predictable, the commonweal, often enough, resembles some kind of Bizarro land where presidents say things like: “When we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.”  Where Rupert Murdoch plans to increase revenues by abolishing fees for on-line access to the Wall Street Journal. Where Valerie Plame is barred from disclosing her own CIA connections even though Karl Rove and columnist Robert Novak (at the direction, according to former White house Press Secretary Scott McClellan, of Messrs. Cheney and Bush themselves) were free to do so. No sooner had federal magistrate John D. Bates dismissed Ms. Plame’s civil lawsuit against the administration  — disclosing classified intelligence is apparently well “within the scope of defendants’ duties as high-level Executive Branch officials.” — than another, U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones, ruled that the former CIA operative could not publish the dates of her agency service in her book, “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal at the White House.” Her honor reasoned, “The information at issue [while acknowledged to have appeared in the public domain] was properly classified and has not been officially acknowledged by the CIA.”  The twisted bookends on this Catch-22 are Scooter Libby, who was convicted yet turned loose, and New York Times writer Judith Miller who was incarcerated for not writing the story.

Nothing is more topsy-turvy, however, than the relationship between the dollar and the euro.  When introduced as a physical currency in 2002, the euro fetched around eighty-seven cents.  Now it commands nearly a dollar and a half.  In a sign of the times, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen is demanding payment in euros while rapper Jay-Z flashes continental cheddar in his video “Blue Magic.”  Things have gotten so bad that a Libertarian outfit in Indiana outfit began minting silver Ron Paul dollars before federal agents recently shut them down. As of this writing, it remains unclear how much of the Republican presidential candidate’s one-day record of $4 million in campaign contributions consisted of his own illegal tender. Nonetheless, it is difficult to fathom such a precipitous decline in the greenback given the lack of innovation and productivity found in Euroland. The French, for example, enjoy a 35-hour workweek, two months of vacation and a capital laid to siege every time some overcompensated public works employee grumbles about his pension.  American entrepreneurs, by way of contrast, have cleverly figured out how to multiply your inability to keep up with the resets on your adjustable rate mortgage into a massive global financial crisis.  Now that’s ingenuity.