The school speech that almost was
Two weeks ago, the current Occupant of The White House informed America that he was going to take half an hour of instructional time away from every student in America and address them via a live internet feed. He was going to do this, on what would be the first day of school in many parts of the country.
The hue and cry was deafening, parents all accross the country had an absolute cow. Of course all the Liberals at first talked about how it was a historic first, when that didn't help in the least, they finally admitted that other presidents had also addressed schoolchildren, and how this could not possibly be any worse than any of the other times presidents had done so. Of course the White House had not released the contents of this speech so nobody knew exactly what was to be said, but The White House HAD released the "suggested curriculum" that was to be taught both before and after the address. The curriculum gave a number of clues that the speech would not be the banal pablum of previous school addresses (anybody remember GW Bush reading "My Pet Goat"?), but instead it implied that there was a strong current of proselytizing and "cult of personality" building inherent in the planned speech. Exercises like "Discuss what you can do to help Obama." were in the curriculum. This of course smacked of some of the things Josef Goebbels did in Germany during WWII. This scared and infuriated people all the more.
By Thursday, September third, people were calling and e-mailing the schools demanding that the speech not be broadcast, or barring that, that their child be allowed to be exempted from being brainwashed and politicized. Some libtard moron in the Katy school district actually had the unmitigated gall to write that "Allowing parents to opt their children out of listening to our president or any other elected official will be honored as we honor requests of those who desire to opt out of saluting our nation’s flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.” which did not help matters one iota either. By Friday, probably 1/2 to 2/3 of all the kids, at least in the Houston area, had been exempted. At least those who had the opportunity to exempt them. Remember that this was to be the first day of school for many schools in the country. Most of those parents didn't get the opportunity to exempt their children.
By Saturday the fifth, the "proposed curriculum" was scrapped, but we still had not seen the text of the speech. Many people still believed that it was heavy on indoctrination based on the "I Pledge" video that had been released a few months earlier. So the scrapping of the curriculum was at best a footnote in all this. It wasn't just the curriculum that was the issue, it was the entire idea that Obama could take time out of our kid's schoolday to indoctrinate them. TV news pundits, and even our own hometown fishwrap was asking "How can we be so damned angry about a speech we haven't even heard yet?", which of course was a straw man argument, we were angry, precisely because we didn't know what was in the speech, but we had seen evidence that would imply that it was not a harmless address. In fact many of us, myself among them, figured that the speech he eventually would give would bear little resemblance to the speech he originally intended to give. Finally, on Sunday evening, the text of the speech was released to the public, two days before he was to give it, and late on a sunday evening over a long weekend. A time calculated to draw as little attention as possible. But the Conservative blogosphere ripped into it to find out just what was in this speech. As it turned out, other than mentioning himself something like 36 times, the speech was relatively benign. All the TV pundits said "See! This is much ado about nothing! Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?" All we could say was that we didn't know what was in it but we did not trust the man as far as we could chuck his lousy ass.
Well, now we can definitively say that had we not raised one heluva fuss, things would not have worked out quite the same way. As it turns out, the speech he eventually gave was not the speech he had intended to give. His intended speech was much less innocent and much more damning, but when the hue and cry became deafening, THAT speech was filed in the circular file and a new speech drafted, the one that we eventually read/heard.
It was reported in the Washington Post today that in light of the outcry over the speech, White House speechwriters rewrote the entire speech in an effort to strip out everything that could be interpreted as indoctrination. That admission can logically be assumed to mean that the speech WAS an indoctrination speech, or at least could have been interpreted to be.
H/T Larwyn and Ace
The hue and cry was deafening, parents all accross the country had an absolute cow. Of course all the Liberals at first talked about how it was a historic first, when that didn't help in the least, they finally admitted that other presidents had also addressed schoolchildren, and how this could not possibly be any worse than any of the other times presidents had done so. Of course the White House had not released the contents of this speech so nobody knew exactly what was to be said, but The White House HAD released the "suggested curriculum" that was to be taught both before and after the address. The curriculum gave a number of clues that the speech would not be the banal pablum of previous school addresses (anybody remember GW Bush reading "My Pet Goat"?), but instead it implied that there was a strong current of proselytizing and "cult of personality" building inherent in the planned speech. Exercises like "Discuss what you can do to help Obama." were in the curriculum. This of course smacked of some of the things Josef Goebbels did in Germany during WWII. This scared and infuriated people all the more.
By Thursday, September third, people were calling and e-mailing the schools demanding that the speech not be broadcast, or barring that, that their child be allowed to be exempted from being brainwashed and politicized. Some libtard moron in the Katy school district actually had the unmitigated gall to write that "Allowing parents to opt their children out of listening to our president or any other elected official will be honored as we honor requests of those who desire to opt out of saluting our nation’s flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.” which did not help matters one iota either. By Friday, probably 1/2 to 2/3 of all the kids, at least in the Houston area, had been exempted. At least those who had the opportunity to exempt them. Remember that this was to be the first day of school for many schools in the country. Most of those parents didn't get the opportunity to exempt their children.
By Saturday the fifth, the "proposed curriculum" was scrapped, but we still had not seen the text of the speech. Many people still believed that it was heavy on indoctrination based on the "I Pledge" video that had been released a few months earlier. So the scrapping of the curriculum was at best a footnote in all this. It wasn't just the curriculum that was the issue, it was the entire idea that Obama could take time out of our kid's schoolday to indoctrinate them. TV news pundits, and even our own hometown fishwrap was asking "How can we be so damned angry about a speech we haven't even heard yet?", which of course was a straw man argument, we were angry, precisely because we didn't know what was in the speech, but we had seen evidence that would imply that it was not a harmless address. In fact many of us, myself among them, figured that the speech he eventually would give would bear little resemblance to the speech he originally intended to give. Finally, on Sunday evening, the text of the speech was released to the public, two days before he was to give it, and late on a sunday evening over a long weekend. A time calculated to draw as little attention as possible. But the Conservative blogosphere ripped into it to find out just what was in this speech. As it turned out, other than mentioning himself something like 36 times, the speech was relatively benign. All the TV pundits said "See! This is much ado about nothing! Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?" All we could say was that we didn't know what was in it but we did not trust the man as far as we could chuck his lousy ass.
Well, now we can definitively say that had we not raised one heluva fuss, things would not have worked out quite the same way. As it turns out, the speech he eventually gave was not the speech he had intended to give. His intended speech was much less innocent and much more damning, but when the hue and cry became deafening, THAT speech was filed in the circular file and a new speech drafted, the one that we eventually read/heard.
It was reported in the Washington Post today that in light of the outcry over the speech, White House speechwriters rewrote the entire speech in an effort to strip out everything that could be interpreted as indoctrination. That admission can logically be assumed to mean that the speech WAS an indoctrination speech, or at least could have been interpreted to be.
H/T Larwyn and Ace
posted by Rorschach at
9/16/2009 08:51:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home