Schools and scandal: Nothing Obama does is too dull to stoke the blogosphere’s outrage Editorial Chron.com - Houston Chronicle:
"Depending on which detractor you listen to, President Obama's planned speech to schoolkids this coming Tuesday is either “something you'd expect to see in North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq” or an effort “to indoctrinate America's schoolchildren to his socialist agenda.”"
"Depending on which detractor you listen to, President Obama's planned speech to schoolkids this coming Tuesday is either “something you'd expect to see in North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq” or an effort “to indoctrinate America's schoolchildren to his socialist agenda.”"
The speech's subject? It's a call to personal responsibility: Setting goals, staying in school, making good grades. Stuff that, if anyone else said it, would seem worthy and tedious, right up there with exhortations to cleanliness, politeness and flossing before bedtime.
But we're talking about Barack Obama. And to his dedicated opposition, nothing the president has ever done — starting with his birth — is too dull to inspire white-hot rhetoric. Next time he takes a deep breath, we expect to hear dark intimations that Mao and Hitler breathed, too.
Yes, the White House should have realized that in this super-heated climate, nothing is apolitical, and it should have done a better job vetting the optional lesson plans distributed to help teachers who choose to air the speech. The early version asked kids to write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president achieve his goals. Someone should have noticed that “help the president” — even to achieve a goal as innocuous as improving kids' education — sounds entirely too political.
