You think so short term, Chunga.
No Child Left Behind not only cemented in place the Federal government's immoral role as a central agent of wealth redistribution but constituted an un-Constitutional Federal usurpation of power that is otherwise reserved to the States and to the people.
It would have been to education what Private Retirement Accounts would have been to Social Security...the camel's nose under the tent.
No comparison.
With a Personal Retirement Account, one funds something for himself and receives exactly what s/he put in, plus interest earned or capital gains realized, if any.
With No Child Left Behind, all you'll eventually get is Catholic parents being forced to fund the operations of Sunni Muslim private schools, or vice versa, and all the while, the Federal government will dictate the curriculum.
The proper method of attacking the problem of left-wing indoctrination in public schools would have been to encourage parents to demand standards and accountability from their own local public schools, on a state by state and county by county basis. After all, educational "standards" should be set and "accountability" be created by parents themselves, if parents are the ones paying for their child's education, or the local community, if all lawful residents are liable to finance each child's education. (Parents should not be liable to purchase an education of any type, more generally, just as no individual is required to purchase health care services of any type.) Anything less is just a forced abdication of key parental responsibility to their local and state governments or, in the case of Bush's NCLB, even worse in that it was a forced transfer of key parental responsibility to a building of bureaucrats potentially thousands of miles away.
But hey, that's not a problem for you, Bush, the Congress critters who voted for NCLB, or any of its other proponents, right, since after all, dealing with NCLB's unintended consequences (political "blowback") will be someone else's problem down the line.
And do you know who voted for it? ...What a pack of RINOs!
Why don't you say that a bit louder, perhaps? Or write a vanity? Maybe even throw in some links to official voting records from thomas.loc.gov?
Because it's an excellent case for exactly why supporting the Republican Party may very well be, in the end, naught but a futile endeavor and an exercise in how fast conservatives can gnaw off their political limbs.
If all that the Republican Party--with conservatives in tow--will actually accomplish is just a little bit less government than the Democratic Party, then the Republican Party is doomed to failure, unless, of course, it changes its ways and presents itself as a clear and genuine alternative to the Democratic Party, an advocate for the States, for the individual Citizen and his/her family, and for Constitutional self-governance, rather than just as a faded, two-faced, "lite" version of the Democratic Party and its policy focus on "the common good."
After all, if all the Republican Party can do is talk the talk without walking the walk, then the Party is useless.
After all, if all the Republican Party can do is act like a "lite" version of the Democrat Party, allowing itself to be dragged leftward through the political mud by the Democrat Party, then the Party is useless.
And if the GOP is so useless, then it should either genuinely reform itself, stop pretending to be a Party of small and Constitutional government, or get out of the way and let another Party rise to take its place.
Anything less is an act of giving aid and comfort to the real enemies, if not acting as their agents or outright joining them in their nefarious quest to transform the United States into a Socialist utopia, or as close as they can get to such a pipe dream.
This isn't a given. Conservative Republicans in Congress have been pushing for vouchers for private schools and parochial schools for years as the first step toward enabling poor people to be able to reap the benefits of a nonpublic, quality education firsthand. The steps between "we will allow you to use public funds for private education" to "we can eliminate the step of redistribution and allow you to use your own funds for education" to "we can put education back in the hands of the states" are necessary if we are to ever dismantle the federal government's (and the teachers' union's) power over schools.
What you don't seem to realize, and on this I might be wrong, is that conservatism requires incrementalism in order to succeed. The liberal agenda has been creeping up on this country since Hoover...and the dam just broke with the election of Obama. The only way to stop socialism in America is to elect stealth constitutionalists to positions of Federal power. Entitlements rule the day in Washington. They can't be dismantled en masse, because they're entitlements. The American people will not elect any conservative who states that he wants to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other entitlement...because the Mainstream Media will run interference for the Democrats, as they always have.
Any Republican (Ron Paul excepted) who takes any small step toward decentralization is mocked by you retardos. James Inhofe has flown to Copenhagen to tell the world that President Obama can't deliver on any treaty he signs there...and what do I read here? "Stuff it, RINO!" "Too little too late, Inhofe!"
This is evidence of you having no common cause with actual conservatism. Do you want to talk about short-term thinking? Conservatism refuses to defeat itself by demanding more than it can achieve all at once...by refusing to elect men and women who can't see a span longer than grades 10 through 12.
And every Senator and Representative on my list of folks who voted for NCLB understands what you won't understand for another 30 years.
This isn't a battle. It's a protracted war that's been going on since The Great Depression, but it can be permanently lost in one year by electing guys like Obama ...and by refusing to vote for Governor Palin, you enabled Marxism.
And remember! "Any IDIOT who says Obama would be better for the country than McCain is a disgrace" - holdonnow