Blog de Ford

President Obama is set to speak to our nation’s school children on September 8th to encourage them to work hard and study hard:

President Obama will deliver a nationally-televised address to students next Tuesday on the importance of taking responsibility for their success in school, which the White House calls a continuation of his efforts to use the bully pulpit to promote the value of education.

Obama will make the speech at Arlington’s Wakefield High School, and it will be shown on C-SPAN, on the educational station Channel One and on the White House website.

“The hope is that schools across the country will gather special assemblies to show it to students,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor.

The President encouraging students to do well in school is a good thing, no? Especially when the President studied hard and those studies allowed him to become president when he wasn’t from some fancy political family. You’d think this would be a nice civics lesson where  people of all political stripes might agree that it’s positive for kids to learn that if they study hard, they can achieve their goals.

Well, you’d be wrong. Michelle Malkin laments:

The activist tradition of government schools using students as junior lobbyists cannot be ignored. Zealous teacher’s unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending. Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events.

See? The President telling kids to study hard and then teachers asking the students to analyze those words is socialist indoctrination. Forget about the President’s benign and apolitical words. Forget about the President’s inspiring story.

If the president speaks to kids, it’s indoctrination, so the kids of wingnuts may not attend school that day:

“They’re not only angry, they’re somewhat shocked because this is truly radical in his attempt to go directly to children. Parents respect the relationship and protect the relationship between a parent and a child and they pass their children to a school to learn. They don’t feel comfortable with Obama speaking directly to their children,” Berry said. “We are the parent of that child. It doesn’t take a village. It takes a parent.”On behalf of the president, the secretary of education notified principals about the national address.

While some applaud the speech, it’s controversial to some conservative groups that launched an e-mail campaign encouraging their children to boycott the speech.

Sorry, but do the people who don’t want the President to encourage their kids to study hard prefer that the kids’ follow their parents into bad decisions and aggressive ignorance draped in the flag and religion?

Thankfully, at least one conservative commentator, Ron Dreher (of Beliefnet.com) is making some sense:

What is wrong with people? Honest, what is it? Are conservatives so angry and paranoid that they can’t even be minimally patriotic? Obama might lose on health care, but any conservative movement that’s so off its nut that it politicizes an act of basic civic upbuilding like this has no chance of ever winning the confidence of the Normal American community.

Snip

How fast can I get down to city hall and re-register as an Independent? The Republicans are losing their minds.