Fox News’ holiday shocker: Angelina Jolie hates Thanksgiving

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If there is an afterlife, I hope that I can be reborn as a headline writer for Fox News, where everyone seems to have a riotiously good time mocking or misrepresenting anything that is ever said -- or even imagined to be said -- by a liberal do-gooder. Last week, the target was Barack Obama. The president’s new children’s book happened to celebrate, among a host of other American heroes, the Sioux Indian chief Sitting Bull, inspiring a story from Foxnews.com headlined: ‘Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General.’

And now, just in time for Turkey Day, Fox News is at again, with a story headlined: ‘Angelina Jolie Hates Thanksgiving, Refuses to Celebrate, Report Says.’ Of course, if you read the story, which originally appeared at the gossipy PopEater.com, you’d discover that there’s zero evidence that Jolie said anything of the sort. In fact, the original story, which reads like a parody of a National Enquirer hit job, never quotes Jolie at all, relying on information culled from anonymous ‘family friends’ and ‘insiders,’ who if they were actually friends at all, wouldn’t be sharing such preposterous whoppers with a tabloid writer.

I mean, if one of your friends was actually talking to a tabloid snoop, could you imagine them stringing together a couple of sentences like this? ‘Jolie hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans,’ the friend supposedly said. ‘To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style. She definitely doesn’t want to teach her multi-cultural family how to celebrate a story of murder.’

Yeah, right, that’s just how any one of my friends would put it -- Patrick hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans ... . But at Fox News, anything that can serve as fodder to ridicule lefty Hollywood celebs is fair game, which must be why Fox’s slogan is ‘fair and balanced.’

With Thanksgiving upon us, I’d prefer to take the high road by offering up one of my favorite moments from my favorite Thanksgiving movie, John Hughes’ ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles.’ It stars Steve Martin and the late John Candy as mismatched travelers trying to get home for Turkey Day. (If you watch the movie, you’ll see why every critic in America complained that ‘Due Date’ was a callow rip-off of this wonderful tale.) In this scene, known to fans as the ‘Those Aren’t Pillows’ scene, the fellas, stuck for the night in a cheap motel room, wake up in a sleeping posture that turns out to be a little too close for comfort. Enjoy!