I saw a woman I like very much the other day. I hadn’t seen her in awhile and I don’t expect to see her again before December 25. I know she’s a conservative. As I hugged her, I wished her a Merry Christmas.

Look, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Super Saturnalia, Awesome Athiestica, I don’t care. But if YOU do, and I know your preference, I’ll tailor my well-wishes to you. Generally, I use ‘Happy Holidays’ because I don’t know who does what at any given moment and I intend to wish people the best of the season. Secretly, I think we should all use the real message, “Holy crap, we survived another one!” but I doubt it will catch on anytime soon.

When conservatives launched their war on the non-existent war on Christmas, insisting everybody say ‘Merry Christmas,’ lefties responded that ‘Happy Holidays’ covers them all. This seems to have set up a two-side thing but I don’t have loyalty to any of them. If I see you wearing a sweater with Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, trimmed trees, and snow – you know, to capture the glory of Christ’s spring birth – I’ll wish you ‘Merry Christmas.’ Your yarmulke is definitely going to inspire a ‘Happy Hanukah.’ Honestly? I’m not familiar with the symbols of other religions, so you’re going to get a ‘Happy Holidays’ but that’s lack of information, not aggressive anti-Christmas.

I’ll tell you this: Looks like it’s going to be another year with zero casualties in the Season’s Greetings War…

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Hunter got into more trouble. Tax troubles in California. Cons are certain Joe Biden is running interference for Hunter in his various cases and they think Joe should suffer because of Hunter’s misdeeds. They believe Joe is covering for Hunter because they KNOW that, given the chance, THEY would interfere to protect 45. They already have! It’s called projection. They know they would cheat, so they assume everyone cheats.

In a completely unrelated note (but is it?) rational people the world over are currently freaking out about the possibility that 45 might end up back in the Oval Room. (Apparently, it’s not an Office.) One main reason is the power of the President to issue pardons. Everyone knows (even the cons know) that if he gets back, Trump will pardon his henchmen and try to pardon himself for his and their crimes.

But wait! That means that if Joe wanted to run interference for his son, he could easily PARDON Hunter. But he hasn’t done that. Why, pray tell, would he tinker around the edges and never just solve Hunter’s problem? Nope, he’s letting it play out properly.

Another always-wrong conservative hypothesis bites the dust…

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This is your world on conservatism. A Texas woman got pregnant and, sadly, the fetus is not viable. It has a fatal chromosomal condition called Trisomy 18 and cannot survive. Doctors have warned that continuing the pregnancy could endanger the life of the mother and/or her future fertility. Texas, of course, is one of those “Suffer, Bitches” states and she had to sue to get permission to obtain an abortion. The judge in the case, Maya Guerra Gamble, has given official permission for the procedure.

It’s obnoxious enough that the conservatives inserted the extra (costly) step to the only viable choice this woman has but, hey, it worked out, right? Well, no. Of course not right. Because of the right. The Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, (go ahead, guess which party. I’ll wait.) has warned every doctor he can think of that he plans to take legal action against any/every medical professional who dares to help that woman.

Oh, for good measure, he has also threatened medical facilities in the area – just in case she finds a doctor who cares more about good medicine than partisan politics. In his letter to the facilities, Attorney General Paxton actually wrote (I’m not making this up) that Gamble was “not medically qualified to make this determination.” Ostensibly, AG Paxton studied law, not medicine. How is HE medically qualified to deny the judge’s motion? Oh, and wouldn’t Judge Gamble’s original decision have been based on input from medical professionals, specifically, doctors? I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and suggest that doctors are FAR more “medically qualified” than the AG. Oh, but evil never rests.

You see, the State of Texas appealed the ruling, asking the State Supreme Court to put an immediate hold on Judge Gamble’s ruling – which it did “without regard to the merits.” This is just cruelty writ large. This is no party girl who just wants an easy way out. This woman wants to be a mother. This is a tragedy in her world. There is no “baby” to protect. The fetus is not viable. Continuing the pregnancy puts the mother’s life and future fertility at risk. There is NO reasonable explanation for why these men – and you KNOW it’s men – are fighting this, except for their real reason for being anti-abortion in the first place, “That slut had sex and needs to be punished for it.”

I’ll tell you this: This is the world conservatives want for everybody, Americans first. If this kind of horrific nightmare is what you crave, you really should vote Republican. But if you prefer a better world for FAR more people, never, ever vote for any conservative. Those people have “issues” and they want to inflict as much damage as possible, as far and wide as possible, because of them.