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Loons should shut up and listen: Obama not out to brainwash schoolkids
Monday, September 7th 2009, 4:00 AM
Sullivan/Getty
There have been some
creative protests against the health care plan of President Obama
(below).
Miller for News
The woman came across Third Ave. at 115th St., four children holding on to
her and each other, the fifth being pushed in a stroller, all of them walking
toward the PS 57 Leadership
Academy, also known as the James
Weldon Johnson School.
The woman was asked what kind of school PS 57 was and smiled.
"A good one, that's what kind," she said. "Pre-K through seventh grade."
There were these bright orange banners on the outside of the school along
115th, the morning wind blowing through them like banners at the ballpark,
announcing a "Rigorous Curriculum" and "Scholar Programs" and "Theater" and
"Visual Arts." On a bright morning like this, the place about to come alive this
week, it was like a shining landmark of the city.
Except that if you have been listening over the past few days to the lunatic
fringe, PS 57 and all schools like it, in New York and all across
the country, are at great risk now, not because of budget cutbacks or the swine
flu, but because President Obama wants
to give a speech about education to the nation's schoolchildren tomorrow.
If you want to get a sense of just how haywire the country has gone lately, in less than eight months of the Obama presidency, start here. Start with the
crazy people you saw on television this weekend, women actually crying that
Obama's plan is really to brainwash her children, like he's invading her kid's
middle school because some other President already invaded Iraq.
Of course. Who would want to put their children at risk this way, listening
to a success story like this President's, listening to him describe the
possibilities of both education and America, talking to
them about hard work? But then so much of this comes from the same
mouth-breathers who look at a health care plan as some sort of Socialist
manifesto, and see opposition to it as a call to arms.
Only in this kind of climate could a traditional speech like this, to be
delivered on C-SPAN and via the White House Web
site, be seen as a controversy, actually get parents to think they are putting
their children at risk by sending them to school tomorrow.
Minnesota Gov. Tim
Pawlenty, who thinks he is going to be President someday even as he makes Sarah
Palin sound like a Fulbright scholar in comparison, called the Obama speech
"disruptive."
"I don't think [the President] needs to force [his speech on education] upon
the nation's schoolchildren," Pawlenty said.
If Pawlenty thinks that, here's all he really knows about the nation's
schoolchildren: He didn't hit the books nearly hard enough when he was one.
Pawlenty has thrown in with all those who have decided they have to hate this
President on everything, already making his election seem like some kind of
accident. You see Charles
Krauthammer, one of the kings of the haters, writing that Obama "only" won
by 7 points in a year when the Republicans blew up their own party and the
economy at the same time. Right on, Krauthammer! No one, certainly not him, ever
thought an African-American would come close to the presidency and now when
Obama wins, he "only" wins by 7 points.
This is no longer about dissent, or disagreement with Obama's policies. This
is something deeper and meaner, something that seems to come from a foreign
country, not this one. How else do you explain a speech about education and hard
work being seen as a threat?
Another idiot, Florida
Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer, has suggested that Obama is trying to
"indoctrinate America's children to his Socialist agenda." Somebody needs to
inform Greer, and fast, that Glenn Beck's time slot
on Fox News hasn't opened up, at least not yet.
Some of this is racial, though Obama's critics would never see themselves as
being racist in a million years. But there is something more going on, not just
white versus black but white hats versus black hats, on both sides of politics,
both the right and left selling conflict with both hands, trying to give you a
Civil War every night on Cable America because that's where the ratings are.
Only it's not civil. And somehow the most gullible people have been convinced
that the enemy is anybody who disagrees with them. About anything.
Maybe the ones who fear Obama the most, the ones who hate him the most,
should try doing what a lot of schoolchildren will do tomorrow, as this
President tries to inspire them:
As a change of pace, maybe they should stop shouting and listen.