The email stupidity continues

Received this email this morning from a long time friend of the family:

[Fwd: Fw: Fw: Christmas Cards]

Great Idea!!!!!

>Christmas Cards !!!>Yes, Christmas cards. This is coming early (really early) so that you can >get ready to include an important address to your list.>>Read on........ Fun with the ACLU...... Wanna have some fun this CHRISTMAS? >Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD this year at the same time you mail out your >usual Christmas Cards.>>As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this >holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN, card to brighten up >their dark, sad, little world.>>Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it>>Here's the Address, just don't be rude or crude. (It's Not the Christian way, you know!)>>ACLU>125 Broad Street>18th Floor New York, NY 10004>>Two tons of Christmas cards would freeze their operations because they >wouldn't know if any were regular mail containing contributions. So spend >39 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone.>Also tell them that there is no such thing as a "Holiday Tree". . . . It's >a Christmas Tree even in the fields!!>And pass this on to your email lists. We really want to communicate with >the ACLU! They really DESERVE us!!

My reply which was sent to everyone who received the original email:

Dear Miss xxxxxx,Thanks so much for forwarding me that hysterical joke. I really needed it this morning. There is nothing like having a good chuckle with my morning coffee to start the day. I’ve seen it a hundred times before but it makes me laugh out loud every time I see or hear it.

But there are a couple of things I noticed that I wanted to point out before you sent it to anyone else:

1) You accidentally sent me the original that you received and not the version that you took a few minutes to you clean up and make legible. While I am able to read through the fragmented sentences; typos; and poorly constructed paragraphs that all run together, the average person isn't. Can you imagine if some mindless person received this in its current state and continued to forward it? Why, that is a joke all in its own! LOL!

2) Also, somewhere during your editing the punch line (along with half of the joke) was left out. Oh My GOD can you imagine if some fool received a copy of the joke without the rest of the joke, reading the punch line and thought you were serious? Too damn funny! Here is my favorite ending to the joke so you can compare it to your own and see which one you like best:

Those wacky Fundamentalist Christians began circulating the ACLU hoax at the tail end of 2005, during the so-called "War on Christmas" controversy over (among other things) some businesses' eschewing use of the phrase "Merry Christmas" in favor of "Happy Holidays" (or some other non-Christmas-specific wording). It resurfaced again in August 2006, well ahead of that year's holiday season. As a call to action, the scheme this joke proposes (i.e., flooding the ACLU with Christmas cards) has several serious flaws:

It is based on the erroneous assumption that the ACLU engaged in litigation and related tactics to pressure businesses and other entities into dropping the use of the word "Christmas" in favor of non-religious references during the holiday season. This was not the case. Some manufacturers and retailers opted in 2005 (and earlier years) to use religiously-neutral wording in describing their goods and services during the holiday season that runs from November to January, but they did so because they felt such a move would appeal to a broader customer base, not because they were urged or pressured into doing so by the ACLU.

The ACLU headquarters on Broad Street in New York is quite well-staffed, and they could easily divert resources to temporary Christmas-card opening duty in the mailroom for a few weeks without "freezing their operations" in the process.

Private, unsolicited contributions sent by U.S. Mail constitute a relatively small portion of the ACLU's operating budget, and most of those are sent through local affiliate offices, not through the main office in New York. Therefore, if a temporary spate of Christmas cards really threatened to interfere with their operations, the Broad Street office could simply throw the cards away unopened without fear that they were losing a significant amount of financial contributions as a result.

Above all, any rational person might consider whether engaging in deliberate deception and attempting to sabotage an organization's operations over a chimera isn't the antithesis of what Christmas (and Christianity itself) is supposed to be about. The truth is that if every stupid person (usually one of those Wacky Fundamentalist Christians) who wasted .37 on a stamp and $2.00 on a Holiday card and sent to the ACLU were to make a donation to a worthwhile charity a whole lot of people could receive assistance with food, clothing, and shelter for the Holiday season.

Of course that would be too simple wouldn’t it? It’s much more fun to be a Wacky Fundamentalist Christian with too much fucking time on their hands than a Rational Person who actually gives a shit about their fellow man. Isn’t it?

Again, Miss xxxxxx, thanks for the joke! It made my day. Oh, in the event I forget to tell you, Seasons Greetings! May the lights of your Holiday Tree shine bright and long!

Regards,

Pookie