Wednesday, September 9, 2009

‘Indoctrination’? Look who’s guilty


By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer

Instead of scary, the spaced-out right-wing cultists of the Republican Party now simply are looking pathetically dopey.

They flopped in portraying Barack Obama as an illegal alien using a phony Hawaiian birth certificate to conceal his real origin as an Africa-born Muslim. They tried linking him to terrorists. They bungled attempts to transform him into a "socialist." They fell flat charging Obama would take weapons from gun owners. Their alarm about health care "death panels" to "pull the plug on grandma" has become grist for late night TV gags.

Their most recent effort has really done them in—that his speech to school students was an attempt to "indoctrinate" the young with evil, ideological radicalism.

Even conservative zealot Newt Gingrich saw the peril in associating with these freaks. Reading an advance copy of the president's 25-minute speech, Gingrich called it "good" and recommended that students listen and learn from Obama. Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer, who earlier claimed the speech would be "socialist ideology," said after reading it that he was wrong and advised students to listen.

So, people, who was indoctrinated?

Who else but students whose ears were covered by their parents? Mom and Dad have set their darlings on paths to lives of closed minds—to distrust their president without hearing what he has to say, to distrust the judgment of teachers without watching what they choose as educational TV, to inferentially regard a black politician as inherently suspect in what he says and does.

These kids could be future recruits for the John Birch Society, militias, Aryan Nations, neo-Nazis, Texas secessionists, KKK and other groups whose members spread moronic rumors, shout down speakers at town halls, bleat slogans about "taking our government back," hate most social institutions and never blame their shortcomings on themselves.

No president in this generation of parents' lives has been a source of potential inspiration and a model for emulation as Barack Obama. His astonishing education achievements alone while growing up in a single-mother/working-mother home of sparse resources should be an example of what parents should wish for their offspring.

As for his Tuesday speech aimed at American students, it was boilerplate idealism any adult might utter. But coming from Obama, the first black president with world-class credits as a scholar and intellect, it had truer meaning than ever.

Now that no such "indoctrination" occurred during Obama's speech, the students seem safe.

And now comes the waiting period before the next lunatic warning from Republican extremists about President Obama. It'll be a dandy, whatever it is.




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