Attentive citizens probably don’t need to be reminded that about 50% of Americans would love to have an American theocracy every bit as retrictive of individual liberties as in those hated Middle Eastern countries. The reason they can’t quite pull it off is because 1) The Constitution inconveniently gets in the way, and 2) the religious nuts are just too silly to be taken seriously. Latest example is the hullabaloo over President Obama’s Thanksgiving address, wherein the prez forgot to include the word “God”.

 First of all, somebody actually listens to Presidential holiday addresses? And when they do, do they listen with a critical ear, waiting to catch the slightest disconsonance so they can run to their blogs or tweets or Facebook page to get all pissy and moany about it? Sadly, the answer is ‘yes’.

I, for one, am friggin’ ELATED that Obama didn’t mention God, and furthermore I hope he did it intentionally just to get a reaction. (But that wouldn’t be Obama, who’s as much about God as any president in recent memory.) Obama did remind us to be thankful for this, grateful for that, and especially thankful  for all the troops overseas for protecting our freedom, meaning our oil supply. You’d think that would be good enough for the righties, but it wasn’t. And that’s because there is absolutely nothing to big or too small that this bunch won’t complain about if it originates with Obama.

I await the day when a president has the balls to entirely eliminate all the ceremonial falderal, gimcrack, and gew-gaw that traditionally goes with the office and that includes that stupid pardoning-the-turkey stunt. And why, really, do we need the President to remind us what we should be thankful for? Is there an assumption that many of us really want to celebrate Thanksgiving but need some imperial consultant to spin to show us how? And as far as the troops are concerned, I’ll be thankful when they’re all safely home and not until.

Also churning around out there in far cyberspace was another nutty religious Thanksgiving  trope, that Butterball turkeys were secretly helping to usher in sharia law. As it turns out, a handful of Muslim haters, led by Pamela “Ground Zero Mosque” Geller, poked around and discovered that Butterball turkeys were slaughtered according to the traditions of halal, the Muslim version of kosher. Actually, not a lot of intensive investigation was required for this blockbuster because it says “halal” right on the Butterball label. Do you think Geller and her ilk actually care by which method a turkey’s throat is slit, or do you think that they merely fly into a tizzy over anything Muslim? Talk about having too much time on your hands.

I hope next year Obama reminds us to be thankful that we ‘re not all idiots.