The New York ‘Post’ Joins the War on Christmas!

The latest salvo in the war on Christmas comes from an unlikely source — the famously conservative New York Post! Conservative film critic Kyle Smith weighed in yesterday with a radical revisionist interpretation of Frank Capra’s holiday classic It’s A Wonderful Life that posits that everyman protagonist George Bailey is actually a stupid racist vandal, and that the true hero of the story is the opportunistic businessman Mr. Potter. Smith may be on to something when he points out that Bedford Falls is sort of a creepy place in addition to being terminally dull, but his case for Potter and his plans for urbanizing the small upstate New York town is clearly nothing more than a contrarian defense of unchecked capitalism. Smith’s aggressively pro-business political stance is fairly predictable for the Post, but we’re surprised to see the virulently pro-Christmas paper denigrate cinema’s most famous icon of the Christmas spirit! —Matthew Perpetua

Jump, George, Jump! [NYP]