Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, to crib from Andy Williams, is “the most wonderful time of the year.” With our tree trundling down the street in the back of a dump truck and the ornament shards surgically removed from my feet, I can finally exhale and give thanks that this season, despite the very real prospect of a satanic monument looming over the Oklahoma City Capitol, Fox News eschewed Bill O’Reilly’s timeworn and quixotic defense of Christmas and instead ran with Megyn Kelly’s assertion that both Santa and Jesus are white. But wait, doesn’t the Mormon Church’s (and by extension the Romney family’s) recent inclusion of blacks mean we can no longer rely on such traditional stereotypes?  Possibly, but given that Santa works only one day a year, odds are he’s colored.  So it’s all the more confusing that an African-American ninth-grader was rebuked for wearing a Santa costume to a school holiday party.  When his teacher queried, “Don’t you know Santa is white?” he was really asking why the commonweal’s preeminent roles — whether real or imaginary — are no longer the exclusive bastion of Caucasians.  The NASCAR crowd, apparently, can’t cotton to the fact that the highest office in the land is currently occupied by a Negro.

“I think it is a kick in the face,” grumbled Red McCombs after the University of Texas hired the unmistakably chocolate Charlie Strong as its new football coach.  The co-founder of Clear Channel Communications and former owner of the Minnesota Vikings characterized the situation as “wrong”, noting that a more appropriate role for Strong would be “position coach, coordinator or locker room attendant.”

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry, wounded by such overt racism, longs for a more just and inclusive world; one where Santa is a penguin, where the Miami Dolphins sing Kumbaya, and where the word “nigger” is supplanted by “Obamacare”.  Perry called it a derogatory term, “meant to shame…  and demean.”  And in the context of The Affordable Care Act’s contentious and spastic nascency, it does neatly weave together the concepts of entitlement, ignorance and ineptitude.  I do wonder, however, whether rappers — far and away the heaviest users of the “n-word” — will embrace the switch: “I’m up in da club with all my Obamacares” is admittedly less lyrical than, well, just about every damn song on the radio today.

Despite its status as the President’s signature piece of legislation, the ACA was nearly stillborn on arrival; due to massive hardware and software glitches, only 26,000 consumers were able to successfully navigate healthcare.gov during its first month online.  Shortly thereafter, millions of Americans were informed of health insurance cancellations, contrary to Mr. Obama’s solemn promise that, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”  Though the vast majority of extant schemes failed to provide the ten minimum care standards outlined in the Act (e.g. mental health treatment and pediatric dental care), the bulk were supposed to be “grandfathered” in.  It is almost sinister, then, that HHS was, behind the scenes, tightening the regulations to exclude, for example, any plan that raised its co-pay after March 23, 2010.  Yet the greatest embarrassment came in the form of Jessica Sanford, a single mother touted as an Obamacare triumph.  In a Rose Garden address, a preening President read from her letter: “Now we finally get to have coverage… for $169 a month.  I was crying the other night when I signed up.”  Unfortunately, the Washington state health exchange had incorrectly calculated Sanford’s subsidy; the actual premium found her squarely “priced out” of the market.  Adding insult to injury, imposition of the uninsured penalty (in her case approximately $390) left her, as she posted on Facebook, feeling “screwed”.  It’s as if Dr. King somehow foresaw Obamacare when he said, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”