The recent kerfuffle over Christmas trees shows that our national discourse has devolved to an abysmal level.
Christmas tree growers like Don Spilker of Lincoln (Neb.) thought they were on the way to better marketing of live Christmas trees.
They wanted to imitate promotions like the Got Milk? campaign launched by the milk industry or the Beef. Its whats for dinner campaign by the cattle industry.
Then Gretchen Carlson of Fox and Friends said Nov. 9 that the Obama administration is Grinching 15 cents out of your pocket potentially. In a nanosecond, conservative zealots all across the map were claiming that President Barack Obama wanted to put a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees. Within a few hours, the permission for the marketing program was withdrawn by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
As nearly as our research was able to determine, the fuss started with online commentary at the Heritage Foundation website on the evening of Nov. 8 by David S. Addington, who repeatedly called it a Christmas tree tax.
He concluded, And, by the way, the American Christmas tree has a great image that doesnt need any help from the government.
Mr. Addington, allow us to lead you out of the overheated offices of Washington-based think tanks into the cold reality of business competition. In the real world, the sale of live Christmas trees is plummeting, down from 37 million in 1991 to 31 million in 2007.
This is the challenge facing business people trying to make a buck growing live Christmas trees. So 3 1/2 years ago, they started working on a way to more effectively market live trees by assessing a fee on growers not customers, mind you. The growers were trying to pool their own money for an advertising campaign.
In order that the program would not burden mom-and-pop operations, the growers exempted businesses that sold fewer than 500 trees a year.
The growers went through the usual procedures required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including two periods for public comment. Rules were published in the National Register on Nov. 8. By the next day, after the onslaught of misinformation, the program was suspended by the Obama administration.
For me, its hard to understand when it had such a long comment period time and there were so few negative comments against positive comments, said Spilker, who is on the board of the National Christmas Tree Growers Association.
What happened was that ideological zealots saw a way to zap their political opponents. They didnt care about the facts. They didnt care about business people trying to earn an honest buck.
Maybe Addington and his buddies prefer fake Christmas trees. No problem there. Its a free country. But they dont have a right to use fake facts.
