Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [172]
b
“Fool around with children.” The Canadian age of consent had been set at fourteen in 1892, but in 2008 the government bucked the secular trend and raised it to sixteen. Adolescent sex remains legal in the more depraved parts of Europe. For instance, the age of consent is twelve in Vatican City. (“Canada’s age of consent raised by 2 years,” CBC News 1 May 2008, http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/05/01/crime-bill.html.) Andrew Sullivan, “Red Hot Catholic Love—At Twelve Years’ Old,” The Atlantic, 23 Feb. 2010, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/red-hot-catholic-love.html.
c
O’Reilly neglected to mention one other ominous trend that correlates even more closely with Canadian degeneracy: a rapid rise in the popularity of golf. Prior to the 1990s, golf was not even one of the top five most popular recreational activities in Canada. By 1998, it was the most popular. The correlation between golf and moral decay suggests a link between the whacking of small white balls and the war on Christmas. Some theorists have also hypothesized that the culprit is not the ball whacking itself but rather the clothing fashions associated with ball whacking. The moral of the story: Say “Merry Christmas,” stay away from Canadian teenagers, and don’t wear plaid. (Lance W. Roberts, Rodney A. Clifton, Barry Ferguson, Recent Social Trends in Canada, 1960-2000 [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005]: 545.)
d
“Donated money to the ACLU.” OSI has contributed almost $1 million per year to the ACLU, amounting to 2 percent of the ACLU’s annual budget and 0.2 percent of OSI’s $500 million annual budget. (“Echoing Lyndon LaRouche, Horowitz and Poe smear 14-year-old George Soros as Nazi ‘collaborator’; new book features doctored quotes, factual errors,” Media Matters, 2 Aug. 2006, http://mediamatters.org/research/200608020003; “About OSI: FAQs,” Open Society Institute & Soros Foundations Network, 21 Jul. 2010, retrieved, http://www.soros.org/about/faq#m_expenditures>; “$8 Million Gift Will Boost ACLU Campaign to Fight Bush Administration’s Assault on Civil Liberties,” ACLU, 15 Jan. 2003, http://www.aclu.org/about/support/13308prs20030115.html.)
e
O’Reilly bears personal animosity toward Media Matters, which frequently critiques his unsupported assertions and reported his infamous invitation to Al Qaeda: “You want to blow up the Coit Tower [in San Francisco]? Go ahead.” O’Reilly has called the website “vile,” “anti-American,” and “the most vicious element in our society today.” Most of Media Matters’ content consists of transcripts of Fox News talk shows. (“O’Reilly to San Francisco: ‘[I]f Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it . . . You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead,’” Media Matters, 10 Nov. 2005, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200511100008.)
f
“Conspiracy theory.” To be fair, Bill O’Reilly might not accept dictionaries as objective sources. Fox News “media critic” Bernard Goldberg argued on The O’Reilly Factor that “the dictionary is written by some liberal person.” O’Reilly responded by bashing the liberal media, leaving his position on dictionary bias unspecified. (“Bernard Goldberg Complains about the Liberal Bias in O’Reilly’s Dictionary,” News Hounds, 18 Mar. 2009, http://www.newshounds.us/2009/03/18/bernard_goldberg_complains_about_the_liberal_bias_in_oreillys_dictionary.php.)
g
Jackie Mason, the aging Jewish comedian, is also a serious conservative ideologue. He offered The O’Reilly Factor his own colorful explanation for the war on Christmas: “It’s in now to be . . . to hate religion. It’s in now to be hip, to be a swinger because they’re living a dirty, filthy, obscene, vulgar life, and they’re guilt-ridden about it. So any connection with religion somehow feels like an interference to their lifestyle. So they want to eliminate religion; they shouldn’t feel dirty.