Posted on 09/08/2010 6:46:10 AM PDT by La Lydia
...That’s right, the president will make September 14 the second-annual Obama Day at your local school! You might recall last year’s Obama Day, for which the U.S. Department of Education put out teaching guides that gave parents across the country reasonable cause to fear a day of liberal politics and celebrating President Obama. You might also remember the divisive national uproar that precipitated, which ultimately culminated in a relatively staid — but nonetheless campaign-esque — speech, not to mention a fair amount of after-the-fact sneering at people who either didn’t want public-school kids exposed to left-wing politicking or just wanted their kids, you know, left alone by the president.
Finally, you might recall the May Parade magazine graduation “address” the president wrote that offered just the kind of profit-denigrating, “service” extolling rhetoric that people feared eight months earlier:
Of course, each of you has the right to take your diploma and seek the quickest path to the biggest paycheck or the highest title possible. But remember: You can choose to broaden your concerns to include your fellow citizens and country instead. By tying your ambitions to America’s, you’ll hitch your wagon to a cause larger than yourself. You can choose a career in public service or the nonprofit sector, or teach in an underserved school. If you have medical training, you can work in an understaffed clinic. Love science? You can discover new sources of clean energy or launch a business that makes the most efficient and affordable solar panels or wind turbines.
So will this year’s Obama Day be as controversial as the last installment? Probably not. For one thing, unless the White House is not just wearing blinders, but living in a full-on isolation tank, it won’t authorize the release of any lesson plans to go with the talk. And if it does, it will scrutinize them, put them before focus groups, and torture them until they give up any and all material that could be even minutely controversial.
Second, while there is plenty of anger to go around right now, there’s been no burning summer of discontent like last year’s spree of town-hall conflagrations. It seems the growing ranks of fuming Americans are now more focused on ballot boxes than soap boxes.
Last year there was a sense that President Obama — who’d led the “stimulus” charge, driven the takeover of GM and Chrysler, was championing huge and incomprehensible health-care legislation, and had repeatedly been in Americans’ faces — was simply too much in our lives. Directing his near-ubiquity toward peoples’ kids only made matters worse. Oh, and some of the rather off-putting stuff from the “Cult of Obama,” as Gene Healy dubbed it, probably didn’t help.
This year, while certainly still a presence, it seems the president has made himself more scarce. So the coming address is not likely to launch nearly the same seismic outrage as last year’s. But there’s still good reason to object to it...yet another reminder why the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to interfere in education.
But there is one other, more mundane argument against this speech, and it is being made — as it was in 2009 — by the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews: the president will once again be eating up student learning time...
Sep. 14 is primary election day here — no school.
LOL!
This tawdry, self-conscious Caesarism is getting ridiculous!
Bring your dog to school day?
I wonder if the kids across America are learning any new Cult of 0bama routines for the big 0bama Day.
At about 7:00 in the morning to be exact - usually regular as clockwork.
Primary election day here, but schools are in session.
This has NO PLACE in public schools...
Sure it does. The King has decreed it so!
Way cool! I have two BLACK Labs - hehehe
And my kids will probably laugh their butts off, and make some derogatory remarks....
more like Bring your commie to school day
How in the world is it legal to name schools after living politicians?
Every time I look on a political website, I see advertisements for Barack Hussein Obama.gov to the left and the right — how is this legal? Who is paying for it. And the propaganda is outrageous “visit our website so that you can learn more about is amazing and wonderful scumbag politician who is transforming America”.
How is this legal, for God’s Sakes?
Who is paying for it? Aren’t all.gov sites sponsored by the government and therefore paid by the government — so this means he’s using our taxes to advertise himself?
And now he has his own day at the public schools to promote himself? Shades of Adolf Hitler?
None of this bothers him or all the rest of America?
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