Topic: CNSNews.com
Frank Salvato's Dec. 22 CNSNews.com column offers a handy guide for how to handle liberal relatives at Christmastime. He rather hilariously portrays "Uncle Mel" as the disruptor of all things peaceful during the holiday, "screaming disingenuous and fallacious talking points about WMD, President Bush lying to get us into the Iraq War and Michael Moore being a gifted documentarian":
It is for this reason that many of us look forward to the solace of the holidays, a time when family and close friends gather to celebrate the good things life has to offer. That is until Uncle Mel starts spouting off at the mouth with his multicultural, progressive ideological point of view.
[...]
But as the dinner plates lay upon the table littered with the remnants of a meal that was planned for weeks, invariably Uncle Mel will bring up a topic that will open the door for the end of what promised to be an enjoyable, conflict free evening.
It may start innocently enough, perhaps a mention that we should say a prayer for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan or that the nativity scene was multicultural in nature (although passages in scripture intimate that the "wise men" were not at the nativity but visited the Christ child later).
But just like the slight pause in conversation that occurs when a parent hears their child speak profanity for the first time, the crack of that rhetorical "open door" allows for the seeds of discontent to pollute the camaraderie that until that moment provided a temporary oasis to the ills of the world.
Get the feeling that Salvato is projecting here? One wonders if maybe he, in fact, is the "Uncle Mel" he's writing about, with a propensity for dragging disruptive politics into a peaceful family gathering. One can imagine Savato "polluting the camaraderie" dropping disingenuous talking points like calling Hillary Clinton a "hangman" or Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame as "disgruntled political has-beens" (as we've noted) or ranting about "the aggressive dogma of 'multiculturalism.'" (Indeed, he begins the column by claiming that "the encroachment of multiculturalism" is among the "dangers, threats and coercions" America faces.)
It would be more interesting to hear about the Salvato family Christmas from the point of view of "Uncle Mel," if only to hear his reaction to being treated so condescendingly by Salvato in his column.
