It seems like everyone in D.C. is trying to leave town early to get in some Christmas vacation before the Iowa Caucus. And so it's time to comment on the candidates and their holiday ads. I'd like to Grade them.

Candidate:Huckabee
Grade:A+
Alternate Title: What Would Be So Wrong if I Was Celebrating Christmas?

Analysis: Huckabee has no money to run this ad. So they light it just right to get the floating cross/bookcase effect, and Drudge goes nuts. Adding in the bit about "celebrating" the birth of Christ makes it just specific enough to have a "War on Christmas" topspin. Then when he's called on playing the Christian card, he makes himself even more likable. Well played.

Candidate:Giuliani
Grade: B
Alternate Title: Sweat my Sweater

Analysis: Reagan could pull off brown suits. I'm not sure Giuliani can pull of a red sweater. Other than that - just fine. Michael Crowley of TNR has noted Giuliani's strange "jokey" campaign - and this fits right into it. Think Giuliani will let Santa into American airspace after Jolly Saint Nick delivers presents to the Christians in Iran?

More Below the Fold 

Candidate:Clinton
Grade: C-
Alternate Title: Stocking Stuffer Social Justice

Analysis: Do Democrats really want to portray their social programs as gifts they are handing out? What's the weird font for "Happy Holidays?" I hate the reflexive hatred of Hillary Clinton. Yet, I still can't warm up to her - at all.

 
Candidate: Edwards
Grade:B
Alternate Title: Christmas is About Giving a Shit

Analysis: Edwards lacks the sartorial daring of Giuliani. But he talks about "miracles" in this season and promised not to forget the poor. At least Clinton is offering "Universal Pre-K". I bet the poor can count on her for that more than they can on Edwards' signs and wonders. He really knows how to telegraph "sincerity" with those brow gestures.

Candidate: Obama
Grade: A-
Alternate Title: My Wife is More Vibrant than I Am

Analysis: Cute kids really help any ad this time of year. Allowing the "C" word in the ad makes him seem less threatening. He'll meet with the enemies in the War on Christmas with no preconditions in his first year in office.

Candidate:Paul
Grade:A-
Alternate Title: More Fecund than The Mormons

Analysis: Red Shirt! Paul has a big-ass family and a really cute granddaughter (Polka dots). But why are you taking time off when your supporters just gave you over 6 million dollars in a day? I like how the music is "people-powered."

 Technically the following isn't a Romney commercial. But he's in it with his family and a lot of snow. So I'll link to it.

Tell me. Does that small scared child say "No!" just before Mitt launches him down the hill? (Right around :54 seconds into the video?)  

National Review endorsed Romney and their cover featured an ol' timey heroic painting of him. In keeping with the spirit of the season and the magazine, at The American Conservative, we've also put a painting of a candidate posing heroically on our cover.

Check out the three articles. Michael Desch on Giuliani's foreign policy team, Tom Piatak on the disaster of nominating a pro-choicer to lead a pro-life party, and Glenn Greenwald on Hizzoner's record of straining at the limits on his power.

L.A. Weekly has an absolutely incredible article on the resurgence of gang violence in L.A. and around the nation, with a particular focus on Watts. One of my favorite pieces of journalism this year.

The heavily-funded OB-GYN, Ron Paul, has been getting flack from liberals for opposing legal abortion. Yesterday, Dana Goldstein was aghast that Andrew Sullivan had chosen to endorse Paul. Her post is.... hilarious.

his tribute to Paul lionizes the Texas congressman as a classic "live-and-let-live" libertarian without ever mentioning the deep contradiction in his platform: Ron Paul is virulently anti-choice. First Dennis Kucinich said he would appoint Paul his V.P. And now Andrew Sullivan, defender of gay rights, idealizes the guy. Earth to liberals and moderate conservatives who value individual rights and liberty: Ron Paul is not your guy, at least not if you believe women deserve the same freedom as men.  - Dana Goldstein

Don't get too close to Paul! He might infect you with his virulent platform. Don't you believe "women deserve the same freedom as men"? We don't want to go back to the bad old days before Roe v. Wade when only men were allowed to get abortions.

Continuing:

What is "freedom and toleration" without a woman's right to control her reproductive destiny? What is an "ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble" without the acknowledgment that unplanned pregnancy, and the havoc it brings, are features of human life that can not be eradicated? What candidate who stands against "Christian meddling" would strengthen the theocratic movement by allowing states, in the name of religion, to repeal women's rights over their own bodies? 

Nice use of "destiny". Why, Ron Paul, won't you allow women to determine their pregnancies by allowing the stars to pre-determine them? Also, is it smart for pro-choicers to defend themselves by saying that "unplanned pregnancies" involve features of "human life that can not be eradicated." Presumably you can eradicate the "features of human life" that are in-utero.

But it isn't just Goldstein who loses all grasp of the English language and self-awareness when confronted by pro-lifers. Christopher Hayes, in an otherwise excellent article on the divisions of libertarianism, talks about Ron Paul's "full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq and a radical vision of a stripped-down state (though, oddly, one that still forces pregnancy)."

You heard first it in The Nation. He may want to bring the troops home, but the Paul regime will still "force pregnancy."  (What will that Cabinet Department be called, Mr. Hayes?) Funny, most women I know aren't "forced" to become pregnant. (Sometimes they like a few drinks and a Dido record. Other times they ask for love and marriage)

Ezra Klein joined in on the enforced pregnancy meme as well: 

it's a bit hard to square the immense affection Ron Paul receives from putative civil libertarians with his intensely restrictive attitude towards such issues as whether a woman will be forced to use her body as a vessel for childbearing. -Ezra Klein

Ron Paul, why you gots to be so harsh with your "intensely restrictive attitude"? Can't you have casually unrestricted attitudes? Like Ezra Klein. "Vessel for childbearing--" how precious!!

Like many others, I enjoy the music of the Christmas season. I think particularly of "O' Holy Night" being sung at my parish. I remember caroling in high school - even doing a mean "Carol of the Bells" with a select choir. I also think of my 7'' record of Jimmy Eat World covering the song, "Last Christmas." I like dancing around the living room with my ladyfriend as we play Harry Connick Jr.'s Christmas music.

But I recently read that Trans-Siberian Orchestra has sold over five million records of Christmas music. This is frightening. For those that don't know TSO - they are a group of metal heads who have turned their attention to Christmas music - adding in electric guitars and electric violins. It is terrifying.

Christmas traditionally presents to us the image of Christ as the Child born in the cave.  It is the great scandal of the Incarnation; that the Redeemer of the world would be born in a lowly manger.

But have you heard TSO's version of "Carol of the Bells?"  Sure, it is not a sacred Christmas song. But the climax of the song puts me into another mood altogether. It is the soundtrack to Christmas as re-interpreted by Quentin Tarantino. I imagine baby Jesus levitating above the manger and making some eastern martial arts pose with his baby fingers, and with a look into the camera, blowing away Herod's army. The sequel will be set in Rome - look out!

It's that blasphemous.

So please, America, stop encouraging Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  

Every once in a while, it seems my readers like to look into my personal life. So here is something:

Some people think it is late to be doing this. But right now I'm putting up the Christmas tree in my mother's house. While I do it, I usually play a music DVD, like Ben Folds Five Sessions at the West 54th - which remains the best video document of my favorite band ever. (Here is the one sample I could find on YouTube) This year, I'm watching the last season of The Wire - On Demand.

This tree-lifting is usually a solitary effort. Although not always. I remember one year, in high school days, my girlfriend was helping me with the tree. I dated her for more than half my time in Brewster High. That feels like a decade when you are that age. I remember figuring out the fraction of my life that I had spent as her boyfriend. It was significant. She was very sweet to me and she was my first love. If you can have a first love at that age.

At that time I had started taking dance classes - ballroom and swing - and my girlfriend was not my partner. My dance partner had a boyfriend of her own but we were growing close. A little jolt of jealousy can help a relationship. Sustained jealousy rots it.

Anyway, I remember the way she bent herself around the tree and the look of concentration on her face - getting the lights just right. I went outside to get a breath of the cold winter air and then, in the dark of the entrance hallway, I looked at her in the Christmas lights. I was about to call to her, but it wasn't her name on my lips. So I said nothing. I thought I was in danger of breaking her heart. She was very pretty that day. I remember that image of her and my tree came to me years later when in New York City, I bumped into her. (Yes, sometimes in a city of 8 million people you do run into your one ex-girlfriend.) My two friends lingered behind the two of us as we walked through the Village and found a cafe. She was pretty that day - the last time I walked with her.

A few weeks after that Christmas, I stayed home from school, sick. I called her that afternoon and we broke up. After many hand-written letters, I started dating my dance partner that November. On a more recent Christmas, she got a present from a young man. On the following St. Valentine's Day that present revealed an engagement ring. They got married this year, I heard.

For some reason, while I was putting up the tree tonight, I thought to myself, "This has been the best year of my life." And then I heard this Fionn Regan song, and everything you read here occurred to me.

I've lost touch with that girl since. Almost everyone I know has. But I bet this was the best year of her life too.

Let's see. You're the conservative magazine that holds itself up as the authority on movement orthodoxy.

Do you endorse the pro-choice but pro-World War IV Giuliani?

Or the heroic author of the disastrous immigration compromise, McCain?

I think that Fred Thompson would have been the obvious, logical choice if his campaign weren't a flop. Sure he chased skirts in D.C. for years - but he has a credibly conservative legislative record.

But instead they chose the man Larison calls "the dancing fraud", Romney. The same guy who was to the left of most Red-State Democrats, but has flipped and flopped entirely over to the right. I actually don't mind the flip-flopping, it has almost all been in a direction I approve.

Among my small circle, we are now wondering: perhaps Romney is the best viable choice. Not for any of the reasons National Review cites, but for his obvious cravenness. After years of suffering under Bush's politics-of-conviction, I begin to warm to a guy who seems like he would never allow his approval ratings to go into the  20s in order to maintain the delusion that American military power can transform the Middle East into Middlebury, Conneticut. I know that a lot of people are looking to Obama or Huckabee for a politician they can believe in. I'd rather have a guy who has no core whatsoever, whose every belief is negotiable. The last thing we need in this country is steadfast leadership from a member of our political class.

In a must-read article by Christopher Hayes on Ron Paul's roots, Hayes gets at the divisions within libertarians and consults Justin Raimondo, the intrepid Rothbardian and head of Antiwar.com

There's the populist wing of the libertarian movement, and then there's the Washington crowd that's still trying to sell libertarianism, or their version of it, to elites. These people want to go along and get along. As long as they can abort their babies and sodomize each other and take as many drugs as they want to, they are happy. They don't care who is being killed in Iraq and how many Iraqis are dying. That's their hierarchy of values."

This quote has not only the advantage of truth, but also sublime irony. Justin is my hero today.

Sarah Posner's latest on Mike Huckabee and his critics is a textbook example of a certain kind of political commentary that is getting dull lately. It's  full of interesting information and good quotes but the point is that Huckabee isn't an orthodox conservative on economic or immigration issues and this may sink him. Okay. Posner refers to Huckabee's critics in rather heated terms:

For anyone who wonders why this charmer with a perfect record on the right’s core social litmus tests has not already wrapped up the Republican nomination, they need look no further than the disgruntled uber-conservatives who are spitting mad that Huckabee has been too nice to poor people and foreigners - Sarah Posner

This sort of article could be written from any liberal or conservative perspective. You can imagine this alternative:

For anyone who wonders why this successful mayor with a perfect record on the right’s core economic issues has not already wrapped up the Republican nomination, they need look no further than the disgruntled uber-conservatives who are spitting mad that Giuliani doesn't believe the earth is 6,000 years old and that a clump of cells deserves the same legal rights as a human being.

Now, Sarah Posner may not be writing an easy, opportunistic article. (Something that is awfully hard to avoid doing.) She may find pro-lifers to be misguided but idealistic. Creationists likewise harmless. She may not be tempted to write the above about Giuliani. This isn't about her. But I don't find these articles all that edifying. Hawkish conservatives have written many such pieces about Joe Lieberman, or the Casey's of Pennsylvania. All these articles say is "I, the commentator, find a few ideas of candidate X, a member of the party I normally oppose, admirable. His opponents in that party have base, irrational motives for attacking him. That says something awful about the party I normally oppose. That party only cares about greed/war/white supremacy/killing babies/whatever/

These articles are like the potato chips of our commentary diet. Filling and tasty, but not particularly healthy. And we know how Huckabee feels about empty calories. Here is my take on Huckabee in New Hampshire from this summer.