Stephen Colbert — Another Christmas Song, from A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!

It’s 11:30 on a Wednesday night, and it’s been a long day. The debates last night were god-awful to watch, no matter which candidate you support. The media are already working to spin the performances, but you can’t help but feel that if either candidate is said to have won, based on his words or on a scientific — well, scientif-ish – analysis of his facial expressions and body language, it isn’t Obama or Romney who lost. America lost. So, you sit heavily in your armchair and turn on the TV. “Tonight!” yells an exuberant Stephen Colbert before giving the audience a rundown of the day’s stories, he descends through a cloud of words and plants Old Glory into a dais, before a bald eagle – the freest of all the birds – screeches a greeting. “Nation,” he begins, happily tossing a pen into the air and waiting for the audience to stop cheering.

It’s ultimately a sad, adolescent view of manhood — Christians as macho soldiers — that reduces men to testosterone-fueled, war-fighting machines.