Regan's indoctrination was broadcast live, and rebroadcast multiple times to schools.

Your revisionist history is charming. Next thing we know, you'll be telling us really idiotic stuff like Obama isn't a US citizen or that commercial aircraft are spraying chemicals at high altitude.

Sorry Marc, I only read the first couple of lines.

Next thing you know you'll be biting off my finger!

??? uh 20 years makes it possible

No finger biting, I promise (provided you don't punch me in the face like that 65 yr old anti-healthcare-reform asshole did. He's lucky he only had his fingertip bitten off.)!

But I understand why "Conservatives" and Rethuglicans would be upset by the president of the United States delivering the message to kids: work hard, stay in school, succeed. They're anti-education - and the young, educated demographic voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

They're not upset that the POTUS is going to speak to their kids. They're upset because the POTUS is a black democrat.

At the beginning of August, one prominent media figure openly advocated for Obama to address America's children. In the August 9 Parade Magazine, he wrote a column titled "What President Obama Can Teach America's Kids." The piece is a thoughtful and sentimental take on how Obama's experiences Obama could translate into lessons that children could benefit from, like "forgiveness" and "persistence." One of his suggestions reads:


The author? None other than right-wingnut gasbag Bill O'Riley.

You do understand that this shows us that the right is even crazier than we thought, right? For all we hated about Bush, no one freaked out like this over a pro-education speech. Sure, we joked about the irony, but there certainly wasn't the rabid frothing we're seeing from mouth-breathers like Malkin and Beck. These people, seriously, believe that somehow Obama plans to do a Vulcan mindwipe of their children and turn them into robot socialists and communists. In the entire history of the US, that last sentence would be a joke and made in jest. But now we have the right taken over by the truly insane wingnuts. Somehow, because of a poorly worded sentence in a draft statement done back in February and a video done by unaffiliated actors, the Beck-Limbaugh-Hannity-Malkin led right is getting otherwise intelligent people believing them. If you buy this ignorant nonsense and post things about how Orwellian it all is, you're just as ignorant. You folks on the right, are you actually proud of yourselves for being this insane and ignorant? That your hatred of the president being black and a democrat squarely puts you in the position of being anti-education?

I think (but am not sure) that it's a bit much to think all Repubs are stupid or delirious. Rather I see this as all-out partisan warfare on the part of the GOP to attack this Dem President and Congress as viciously as they can, on each and every issue, using whatever tools are at their disposal. If they can whip the public into a paranoid frenzy, they'll do it. Hey, it worked for the War on Terrorism! So I expect it to continue for the next 3 years unabated. If the religious fundie side of the GOP does it better than the more centrist-small gov't faction (if there remains such a thing these days), then that's the direction we'll see the GOP take as we head into future election cycles. And that is indeed a troubling vision.

I generally agree with Mike. Without some data, it's hard to tell how many Republicans really buy into the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh-Malkin rhetoric--though the education speech stuff has been ridiculous, especially considering that it was all optional on the part of the schools to begin with.

Still, it's amazing how much misinformation is out there. Substantial portions of the public believe that proposals for health care reform include government making end-of-life decisions and subsidies for illegal aliens to buy insurance. As with the run-up to the Iraq war, I think the press has been terrible as they continue to report what each side says instead of investigating what the facts might be. I know some conservatives will mock administration supporters for attacking the press, but it's for a different reason: it seems to me that conservatives attack the press for having a "liberal bias," while I'm complaining that the press just fails to deliver basic information whenever there's a dispute. (It seems to me people having a better handle on the facts would help the health care reform cause, so that doesn't say much for the liberal media bias theory.)

There does seem to be a conservative faction--I don't know how sizable--who just want Obama to fail at any cost. That's not to deny that there was probably a similar liberal faction when Bush was in office. But it's interesting to me that this Obama-hatred (if that's not to strong a word) started even before he took office, before he had a presidential record to criticize. In that way, it's not unlike when Clinton won; his detractors were ripping into him on Day 1, long before the Lewinsky affair or other scandals.

I was willing to give W the benefit of the doubt at first because he really did seem like a moderate during the 2000 campaign. But the true-but-misleading statements started pretty darn fast, the secrecy was ramped up almost immediately, and post-9/11 assertions of unchecked executive power posed what I thought was a threat to the foundations of our system of government. So if people have reasons to criticize Obama, that's fine with me.

But the education speech stuff really is bordering on the truly absurd and represent some other kind of opposition. As I wrote before, sometimes I think that if Obama brokered world peace, some people would attack him for putting defense contractors out of business.

The Times has it:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/08/us/politics/AP-US-Obama-School-Speech-Text.html

The nerve of the man to spew forth such grotesque and distorted values to our nation's youth.