Rick Perry not afraid to admit he is a Christian

"Whole country's so bolloxed up I can't even enjoy this uncritically."

The Iowa caucuses are less than a month away, which means it’s time for candidates for the Republican nomination to demonstrate whatever bona fides might appeal to a rural, right-leaning state that also loves education and farm subsidies. It’s kind of tricky, to tell you the truth, but Iowa conforms to the template of contemporary conservatism in at least one way: church people. The state is bursting at the Crocs with evangelical Christians. That’s good news for Rick Perry, whose professed religion is the one part of his campaign he has not yet screwed up. If Newt Gingrich somehow makes himself unlikable between now and then, a victory in Iowa might breathe new life into Perry’s bid. If only he could find some completely safe issue that appeals to religious voters but doesn’t require him to remember anything about policy or events. If only. Video after the jump.

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War on Christmas drags into insoluble quagmire

I'm not saying his parents would have preferred another girl, but he did get stuck with the Kalashnikov.

It’s been approximately four years since Fox News declared that the media and our socio-political overlords had declared War on Christmas, and I’m frankly a little frustrated with progress on the ground. The end of December is still the most expensive time of year to fly anywhere, and the mall is even more choked with wandering zombies dripping Cinnabon on their velour sweatsuits than usual. It’s starting to look like we’ve made no progress against Christmas at all—and at the expense of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Okay, maybe not thousands, but even one more life lost in this war of choice is too many, and frankly kind of embarrassing. We’re America, dammit. We beat the Nazis in four years, and if we can’t do away with one more cultural product of German barbarians in that time, well, maybe we need to reconsider our own preeminence. Perhaps we should withdraw from the War on Christmas entirely and leave it to the Chinese.

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