'Tis The Season to Be a C*ntservative A**hole

Ayn Rand: disgruntled ex-aristo, atheist and hero to American blue collar conservatives who have never bothered to read her books.

It's easy to think of our current crop of c*ntservative panty sniffers and nabobs of greed as somehow peculiar to the age in which we live. But Ayn Rand’s "A Selfish Christmas", broadcast back in 1951, proves that conservatives have always been a**holes - even before the efforts of Newt Gingrich, the Neocons and the religious right inspired me (amongst many others) to coin the term 'c*ntservative'. Here's a rundown on Rand's adaptation of her much vaunted but little read book 'Atlas Shrugged' via Whatever:

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services. Acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible.

Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”