According to The MaryHunter at moonbattery.com:
In a world where the secular left's War on Christmas has spawned such websites as StandForChristmas.com -- which tracks customer ratings for popular retailers for their "Christmas-Friendliness" -- it is intriguing that President Obama can, without a flinch, use the baby Jesus as a hook to justify his nanny-state political philosophy. As Cal Thomas observed today, Dear Leader dared to ask a Northeast Washington DC Boys & Girls Club "why we celebrate Christmas" and got the stunning answer "the birth of baby Jesus." (Ah, from the mouths of babes.) Dear Leader then proceeded to discuss what Jesus symbolizes to people around the world: "the possibility of peace and people treating each other with respect" and "doing something for other people."
Even the "three wise men" were invoked to support the president's idea of wealth redistribution: "These guys ... have all this money, they've got all this wealth and power, and they took a long trip to a manger just to see a little baby."
...which segued into:
"...it just shows you that because you're powerful or you're wealthy, that's not what's important. What's important is ... the kind of spirit you have."
Indeed, and Jesus taught often of the supreme worthiness of the poor and outcast: the poor man Lazarus who was carried by angels to Abraham's side while the heartless rich man suffered in hell (Luke 16:19-31); the widow whose offering of only two copper coins was the far richer treasure (Luke 21:1-4). Many Christians believe that these parables served primarily as a means of condemning the powerful hypocrites and the inhuman nature of the class system in general. However, since class warfare is actually embraced as a key weapon of the statist, the story of Jesus Christ is all too often usurped for completely different purposes by socialist liberals. Cal Thomas continues:
To the president, that means the spirit of government taking from the productive and giving to the nonproductive. To him, Jesus was a socialist or perhaps an early Robin Hood. Any first-year seminarian (if the seminary is a good one) could destroy this flawed exegesis.
Jesus of Nazareth was not a symbol. Neither was He just a good teacher, as some who do not fully accept His teachings about Himself like to claim. As Paul the Apostle put it, "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the worst" (1 Timothy 1:15).
The call of Scripture is to do for other people as we would like to have done unto us, but that call is personal, not corporate. That's because only people can be compassionate. A government check too often brings dependence and a sense of entitlement. A personal touch builds relationships horizontally with others and vertically with God.
What those "wise men" brought were symbols - gold, frankincense and myrrh. What they symbolized was the grandeur of the baby who would become a man and who, in the words of John the Baptist, would "take away the sins of the world" (John 1:29).
It's a little more than infuriating that the left at once strives to both drive the Christ-the-Savior story out of Christmas, and contrive a Jesus-as-Community-Organizer story for their own progressive devices. Jesus was not about politics. Jesus was about salvation.
