At year's end, here's a question worth pondering: Self-styled conservative Republicans dominate Washington. They currently control the White House and both houses of Congress. With the Sam Alito Supreme Court nomination pending, they've got good chance of turning the U.S. Supreme Court into a veritable right-wing star chamber. So how come they and their media enablers are acting like such soreheads and crybabies lately?

Witness the so-called "War on Christmas." This imaginary struggle was largely dreamed-up by FoxNews "personalities" Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson. The subtitle of Gibson's book gives the game away: "How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought."

For "conservatives" of Gibson's ilk, the word "liberal" now means approximately what "Jew Communist" once meant to the Ku Klux Klan. But hold that thought.

I was too busy posing disobedient basset hounds for their Santa Claus photo shoot to actually read the fool thing. But as near as I could tell, the most insidious "liberal" weapon against Christmas consists of substituting godless slogans like "Happy Holidays" for "Merry Christmas."

Never mind that "holiday" derives from "Holy Day," in the same way "Christmas" does "Christ's Mass." (Or even that the White House Christmas card read "Happy Holidays.") It's no longer enough to wish these knuckleheads health and happiness. Failure to actively acknowledge the superiority of Christianity to rival faiths is deemed blasphemy.

Never mind, for that matter, that according to the Catholic liturgical calendar which chief FoxNews theologian Bill O'Reilly professes to revere, what he calls the "Christmas Season" is actually Advent. We're witnessing the "mainstreaming" of paranoid persecution fantasies that used to be the provenance of fringe outfits like the John Birch Society and the Klan.

As Michelle Goldberg pointed out on Salon.com, the "War on Christmas" theme made its first appearance in Henry Ford's 1921 anti-Semitic classic "The International Jew." The seeming irony of its now being peddled by Irish Catholics like O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan (Birchers and Klansmen feared the Pope, too) isn't entirely new. The notoriously anti-Semitic radio priest the Rev. Charles Coughlin peddled the same poison during the '30s and '40s.

In a modest triumph of political re-packaging, crimes once held to be exclusively "Jewish"--impiousness, disloyalty, cosmopolitanism, physical cowardice, sexual license, communism, etc.--are now called "liberal." Maybe it's even progress of a kind, because as Jewish friends are quick to observe, liberalism's a voluntary state of mind, while the anti-Semitic undertones never go away.

In a nutshell, it's the politics of fear. Authoritarian Catholics and fundamentalist divines of the Falwell, Robertson, Dobson persuasions now sing from the same hymnal. See, it's not enough to be tolerant; anything but wholehearted agreement constitutes an attack on their faith. When I encounter that kind of frantic certitude, I figure it's not me they're working so hard to persuade.

All that, I get. As I say, it's an old story. The classic historical study of the subject is Richard Hofstader's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (Harvard University Press, 1996). What I cannot understand, however, is how the Bush White House appears to have succeeded in turning so many once-proud Americans into little whiny crybabies seemingly willing to abandon their constitutional freedoms in the name of the "War on Terror."

From the rise of Barry Goldwater onward, all we've heard from the American right is how we need to "get government off our backs." How the scariest words in the language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." How we should wean ourselves from the government teat and strive to be rugged individualists like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Former House majority leader Tom DeLay, currently under indictment, once called agents of the Environmental Protection Agency the "Gestapo of government ... a bunch of jack-booted thugs."

Then came Sept. 11, and what happened? My man Digby (digbysblog.blogspot.com) may have put it best: "Suddenly the he-men of Wal-Mart and the NRA leaped into Big Brother's arms and shrieked 'save me, save me! Do what ever you have to do, they're trying to kill us all!' They now look to Daddy Government ... to check under the bed for them every night, reassure them that the boogeyman won't hurt them and then read them a nice bedtime story about spreading freedom and democracy. It turns out that underneath all this swaggering bravado, the Republicans aren't the Daddy party--they're the baby party."

Constitution? We don't need no stinkin' constitution. Our Dear Leader, George W. Bush--the same guy who went fishing after somebody read him a Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."--is the only guarantee we need to protect our freedoms. Just this morning, I had an e-mail from a Bush supporter who assured me that if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear.

Thanks, comrade, now I feel much better.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.