One hundred and sixty-five years after Charles Dickens called for civic reform, compassion, humanity and charity to be watchwords in human life with "A Christmas Carol," Hollywood's most rabid conservatives have rallied to make "An American Carol," a comedy that equates dissent with "treason," that presents Bill O'Reilly as a model of political restraint and offers us Kelsey Grammer as the ghost of General George S. Patton.

David Zucker of the "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun" movies, a fellow who hasn't been funny in roughly 165 years, trots out Canadian fossil Leslie Nielsen as a grandpa telling a tale about a Michael Moore-like "Scrooge" who wanted to ban the Fourth of July holiday. A liberal who "hates America" - and is, by the way, "fat" - is visited by the ghosts of John F. Kennedy, Patton, George Washington (Jon Voight) and the Angel of Death (Trace Adkins, who's no Toby Keith), sees the error of his ways and promises to keep the Fourth, forever more.

It's a polemic, a screed, a comic rant and sentimental flag-waver that doesn't work as either. Start with the casting of the late Chris Farley's singularly unfunny brother Kevin as Michael Malone. Yeah, he looks like Michael Moore, but you'll be making your own "the wrong Farley" jokes.

Too mean? How about shooting ACLU lawyers, "zombies" waiving their writs trying to protect "privacy" in the face of the terrorist threat? Or labeling Hitler a liberal? Uh, Dave: Hitler was a racist, anti-Semite, flag-waving fascist, aka an ultra-ultra-conservative.

The movie's basic thesis, that some folks don't think there's any such thing as a "just war," is as absurd as it gets. Except that isn't as absurd as it gets. The movie's history is as distorted as its classic straw-man propaganda.

It's a mean little red-meat mess of a movie, pandering of the most cynical kind. Zucker gets most everything wrong, but no matter. The rubes who eat this garbage up won't know.

But here's a tip. George Washington may have owned slaves and been overly fond of his uniform, but he was nobody's idea of a conservative or a chest-thumper for war. We had conservatives in America in 1776. We called them then what they still call conservatives in Britain: Tories. Only after being on the wrong side of change and history in 1782, most of our Tories packed up and moved to Canada.

Give it some thought, Mr. Zucker. And take that pansy Grammer with you.