All I want for Christmas...

An occasional look at The Drudge Report sheds a bit of light on how today's stories are being spun from the other side. Today they present this trap of a headline: "Feds force bank to pull "Merry Christmas" buttons..." which links to this story from ABC affiliate KOCO in Oklahoma City, under the headline: "Feds Force Okla. Bank To Remove Crosses, Bible Verse". The original KOCO headline sounds quite a bit different from the Drudgester's "War on Christmas" headline doesn't it?

It turns out that a team of Federal Reserve examiners, from Kansas City, deemed a Bible verse of the day, crosses on the teller’s counter and buttons that say "Merry Christmas, God With Us." inappropriate. The Bible verse of the day on the bank's Internet site also had to be taken down. Seems rather straightforward.

Bank customers interviewed by the KOCO reporter had a different view:

“This whole thing is just ridiculous. We all have regulatory bodies that govern us. But this is too much.”

“I don’t agree with it at all. They are taking Christ out of Christmas and life.”

I'm sure many drudgereport.com visitors reading the headline won't dig any deeper and the headline will serve to reinforce their well-established fears of big gummint and the "War on Christmas". This is the problem with the right-wing spin machine. Make up or overly hype a problem and then get all bent out of shape about it. No facts, nothing fair and nothing balanced. Just totally faked outrage, repeated in the echo chamber with amplified outrage. It's truly remarkable.

Happy Holidays!