The Washington Post and other left-wing media are slamming the words of President Donald Trump at the lighting of the national Christmas tree.
Trump followed through with his campaign promise to keep the focus on the Christian message of Christmas.
“Melania and I are full of joy at the start of this very blessed season,” Trump said, “the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak, however, is protecting the legacy of former President Barack Obama, whom she writes was not a Grinch when it comes to wishing “Merry Christmas” and celebrating the holy day.
“He even signed an executive order giving federal employees Christmas Eve off” in 2012, she defends Obama.
Dvorak continues, complaining as well about Melania Trump’s choice of Christmas decorations:
But they’re saying it was President Trump who brought “Merry Christmas” back to the White House. Or at least that’s the story being peddled by Fox News, a handful of conservative bloggers and the White House itself.
The unveiling of first lady Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations this week — including an oddly stark and ominous hallway of bare, shadowy branches that launched a thousand memes — was hailed as some kind of victory for tradition. As though the Obamas did away with every scrap of Christmas cheer for the past eight years and ate tofurky under a Festivus tree. In kente cloth.
The columnist points to a “delightful montage” of the Obama family saying “Merry Christmas” provided by MSNBC.
In 2016, the New York Post offered a review of Obama’s annual Christmas cards, and observed he used the words, “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” with no mention of the Christian message of Christmas.
In his final official Christmas card as president, Obama used the words, “Happy Holidays.”
“We wish you and your loved ones a joyous holiday season and wonderful new year,” the card read as it featured a photo of the Obama family in formal dress.
Dvorak claims conservatives have trumped up “the tiresome and ridiculous ‘war on Christmas’ narrative every time Trump ‘needed a quick cheer,’” Not to be confused with the “war on women” narrative the left streams out whenever Planned Parenthood is embroiled in yet another scandal.
“There is no war on Christmas,” Dvorak asserts, adding, however, that there is a war on Jews and Muslims, “fueled by our commander in chief.”
Interestingly, as the Christian celebration of Christmas approaches, Dvorak fails to mention the genocide of Christians around the world under radical Islamic terrorists, and the rise of anti-Christian sentiment and secularization in the United States that came to a peak during the Obama era.
As Breitbart News reported in January 2015, the year 2014 “saw more global persecution of Christians than any other year in recent history, and can only be compared to the first centuries when Christians were hunted down as criminals in the Roman Empire.”
In March 2016 – when Christians in the Middle East were being terrorized and killed at the hands of Islamic State radicals – the Obama administration refused to call this Christian genocide.
“[T]he terror campaign being waged by ISIS and its affiliates against Christians and other religious minorities meets the definition of genocide” in international law, said Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus.
On the home front in 2012, Obama administration officials and the former president himself cut videos on behalf of Dan Savage and his “It Gets Better Project.” Among other things, Savage was known for his bullying of Christian teens at a national journalism conference.
The Obama administration’s HHS contraceptive mandate forced Christian religious groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor – a group that ministers to the elderly poor – to spend years in court fighting to maintain the same religious freedom to live their faith beliefs in the public square as they have always enjoyed under the Constitution – until Obama became president.
The point is for Christians, Christmas is not about the “words” used in greetings, or the glitter and bows on packages and trees. Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus and what that event has meant for the world.
“Americans have known Christmas as a time for prayer and worship, for gratitude and goodwill, for peace and renewal,” said Trump.
“We’re thrilled to think of the people, across the nation and all across the continents, whose spirits are lifted by the miracle of Christmas,” the president continued, adding that the birth of Jesus Christ “forever changed the course of human history.”
“There is hardly an aspect of our lives today that his life has not touched: art, music, culture, law, and our respect for the sacred dignity of every person everywhere in the world,” the president said.