(Alex R.)

Staten Island has HAD IT with the War on Religious Holidays That Have Been Secularlized To The Point Of Insipidity. So says the editorial board of the Staten Island Advance, who penned an article entitled "Bureaucratic Cowardice" in response to the DOT's decision to remove Christmas and Hanukkah decorations from the Staten Island ferry terminals. "It’s out of some warped sense of political correctness that the people in charge of places that attract a lot of traffic…seem to live in abject terror of offending a handful of cranks." Who's worse: litigious cranks or cranks on an editorial board?

Mayor Bloomberg succinctly identified the problem in his weekly radio appearance yesterday: "The Department of Transportation got sued one time too many."

But the DOT "cowers from the tradition and now clumsily attempts to suppress any effort to mark it, lest one person complain about government function being 'tainted' by any hint of religion." To review the Staten Island Advance's positions on what the city should be spending money on: Occupy Wall Street? Waste of taxpayer money. Paying city attorneys to defend the display of tacky holiday decorations in an area gazed on briefly by commuters? Why, that's "courage."

Besides, it's "absurd" that the government is trying to rub out holiday decorations because of the "overwhelming degree to which businesses exploit Christmas-Hannukah-Kwanzaa to sell their products. No one seems to have a problem with that." Yeah, what's the difference between the place you buy Roombas and every season of Alias and the agency's whose job it is to "maintain and enhance the transportation infrastructure crucial to the economic vitality and quality of life?" Doesn't Best Buy's Geek Squad fill potholes?

Wake us up in the spring, when people go back to complaining about the Ground Zero Mosque.