Christmas gets underway at the White House, with a special guest appearance by Bo, the dog:
Vodpod videos no longer available.One long-standing American Christmas tradition is the Christmas hoax about the president. Probably the most famous, if not the first, was H. L. Mencken’s column in December 1917, in which he claimed Millard Fillmore a failure as president, whose only achievement was putting the first bathtub in the Executive Mansion — all of it make up, whole cloth fiction.
Since the election of Barack Obama we’ve seen claims that Obama had banned Christmas trees, claims that Obama required only Marxist and communist ornaments, and other wild stories that only a fool, a victim of lobotomy, a Bill O’Reilly fan or Michelle Bachmann would believe after the second cup of coffee in the morning.
What will the hoax claims be this year? ABC posted this raw footage of the delivery of the Christmas tree, but that alone will not inoculate us from a Yule-tide hoax.
What atrocious inventions will the Obama-haters send our way this year? If it’s a claim that there’s no tree, you know better already. You’ve seen the video.
More:
- ABC, “Christmas decorating with the First Ladies”
- ABC, “White House prepares for the holidays”
- ABC, “A White House Christmas”
- Yeah, Common Sense Conspiracy is all over it
- Snopes.com already collected the 2011 version of the hoax claim that the White House has banned Christmas trees altogether, or will only allow them to be referred to as “holiday trees”
- At the Bathtub: “Merry Christmas to the ‘right’ people (not you, Mr. President)”
- LA Times story on right-wing efforts to complain about culture at the White House, every Christmas
- “Liberty Counsel” Christmas hoax
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 