BREAKING: Santa Claus Killed and Captured By Navy SEALs, President Obama Declares Victory in the War on Christmas

WASHINGTON – In the wake of a daring military operation the media is now calling "The Miracle on Zero Dark Thirty-Fourth Street," President Barack Obama emerged from the Oval Office on Monday to declare, in no uncertain terms, victory in the secular War on Christmas. 

Nihilists and beleaguered postal workers the world over joined in the celebration as, thousands of miles away, a lone fighter squadron dropped what has been confirmed to be the remains of Santa Claus into the international waters of the Arctic Ocean recently cleared by global warming. 

“A detachment of Navy SEALs based out of a forward base in Barrow, AK, stormed the northerly compound in the middle of the night, when nary a soul was stirring,’” intoned Mr. Obama. “After a brief frontal assault, the team emerged with Claus, 14 hard drives, a smattering of ruminant mammals from the Claus menagerie, and a low-grade nuclear device attached to a sled.”

“We almost had Mr. Claus back in the winter of 2002, after the airing of a particularly trenchant episode of South Park left him cornered in a remote part of children’s imaginations,” offered acting CIA director Michael Morell. “Through unwillingness to bring down the hammer on the desolate areas of their psyches, we allowed him to escape through the porous border of the Candy Cane Forest Province, and ultimately to the safe haven of our erstwhile ally, the North Pole.”

According to information declassified mere moments ago, Claus and a team of fanatical, vertically challenged followers established a compound in Canadian waters north of Ellesmere Island, not far from the geographic North Pole. Claus immediately established a workshop of crack engineers, the full scale and intent of whose work we may never truly fathom.

“We cannot yet comment on the exact extent of the Claus intelligence apparatus, but it is considerable,” said Morell in his official remarks. When pressed, Morell reluctantly confirmed that Claus really did know if and when we were sleeping. There is no word yet on whether the rumored ur-record of the rogue transgressors, code named “The Naughty List,” will see ever see the light of day.

Noted hacktivists Anonymous have offered their services in unearthing the list, operating in the relative security that Santa Claus will most certainly not be coming to town. 

In light of the announcement, some are predicting that American families, no longer gifted the shield of Christmas for the rampant material consumerism defining their lives, will cut back on their holiday purchases, hurtling the fragile economy toward renewed recession.

“If the Fed really cared about America, Bernanke would sack up, quit putting Just For Men in that beard of his, and pick up the holiday slack,” said former Sen. Jim DeMint. “I hate to admit this, but our great nation needs this war – the Keynesians were right.”

Surveying the post-Claus geopolitical landscape, there is a fragile hope that the unique bitterness of this War on Christmas, and the innocence it has stolen, will follow Claus to the depths of the ocean. Perhaps it would be fitting to sink those unpleasant memories beneath the very waters upon which he built his icy fortress of dreams, yet as the sun rises over strip malls and gift-laden UPS trucks, one can’t help but think that this time, the terrorists actually won.