Though Cowards Flinch

So apparently in the US there are circular emails and facebook applications claiming that President Obama has renamed the Christmas Tree at the White House, a ‘holiday tree’. The facebook application amused me. Much in the way of the age old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” it asks “President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas Tree. Do you agree with this?”

It’s popping up in discussion forums and on news sites like myFOX. It’s going up as a question on Yahoo. It’s being posted about on right-wing blogs. No mainstream news organisation that I can see has picked it up yet, but you just know that Bill O’Reilly is waiting in the wings to condemn someone, somewhere for not being Christian enough, as he did with a hapless group of Seattle atheists last year.

No doubt millions of outraged voters will say no, but the whole idea is a hoax. The White House will have two main Christmas Trees, the Obama family Christmas Tree and the National Christmas Tree, across the street from the White House, in the Ellipse. Neither of these are being renamed holiday trees, as FactCheck.org points out:

No less an authority than the National Christmas Tree Association states that this year’s tree was chosen in August and is a Fraser fir grown by Eric and Gloria Sundback of Shepherdstown, W.Va. The news was duly reported by the Associated Press, [...]

That’s confirmed by Semonti Stephens, deputy press secretary to Mrs. Obama. “The Christmas tree will be called the Christmas tree,” she told us in an e-mail exchange. [...]

[The national Christmas tree] isn’t being renamed a “Holiday Tree” either, according to the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction. The park service is already putting together the National Christmas Tree Music Program to be kicked off at the lighting ceremony.

Why is it that people find this rubbish so easy to believe? We know the phenomenon in the UK; Melanie Phillips runs something stupid about it almost every year – which, almost every year, is shot down in flames by people with a blog, a brain and ten minutes to make a few calls and check the sourcing of the story. Or, better yet, access to Google, where the story can often be proved false.

The sort of people who come up with this nonsense are like the crowd in this famous scene: