Intellectual Truancy

It's a sad state of affairs when the president speaking to children about staying in school becomes politicized by the right-wing smear machine. I understand why the LOUD NOISES crowd is encouraging parents to keep their kids home from school tomorrow, without the stupid and ignorant, the GOP would lose 90% of their votes and talk radio would lose 100% of its listeners. But what is truly saddening, is that the "liberal media" (lol) is buying into this nonsense (again) and presenting it as legitimate news (again).

After reading the speech (here's the transcript), it's painfully obvious that there is absolutely no controversy here. I don't consider "stay in school" to be controversial, I suppose if you're Sarah Palin, who presided over the state with the highest dropout rate in the country, you could get a little upset. Obviously, this is probably the least controversial thing any president could do, especially considering that George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan all did it, but its only "politicizing education" when the black Democrat does it. Hmmm. By the way, when Reagan spoke to school children, he went off on a tangent about tax rates, but no politics there, right? It's the Gipper!

All this business about "brainwashing" and "Hitler Youth" (yeah, wingnuts are playing the Hitler card again), it's all just another part of the right-wing's concentrated effort to make Obama seem illegitimate. They have zero respect for the man or the office he holds. I'd like to think that it has to do with something other than his race, but I honestly can't come up with anything else.

And before any wingnut jumps in with their list of idiocy, let me stop them right now: Obama's not that liberal, the economy sucked long before he was elected, our spending has been out of control for 25 years (at least now we're spending it domestically instead of in George W. Bush's sandbox), and we're nowhere near "socialism," no matter how much they scream it.

The country is no different than it was on January 19th, so to throw this kind of temper tantrum over something as non-controversial as this, leads me to believe their problems are entirely with the man himself. Not his policies, not his message, just the fact that they can't wrap their feeble little brains around the idea of a leader named Barack Hussein Obama. To hate a President so much that you can't even allow your children to hear him promote a message of "stay in school and work hard"? Yeah, that certainly strikes at something a bit more personal than the friggin' deficit.