“What? You Agree With Me? Then I Change My Mind…”

I’m writing this Tuesday morning and I know this issue will already played out by the time I get this posted, but this week we’ve seen quite possibly the stupidest political controversy ever…

Oh my God, lock the doors, bolt the windows… The President wants to speak to the children!! (The after-story can be found here.)

Sigh…

Immediately the Republicans became outraged, like they do when Obama does pretty much anything. Did they seriously think that the President was going to start talking health care, energy policy, reproductive freedom or anti-terrorism with a K-12 audience? Please…

The first I heard about The Speech was that he was going to encourage students to study hard and do well in school. I don’t know where all this other crap came from… no wait, yes I do… Fox “News”, of course.

They were busy whipping up the “controversy” because that’s what pays their bills. It didn’t matter that the facts didn’t bear out what they were alleging… Their audience isn’t interested in facts that don’t back up their point of view.

It’s really all very simple. Those that are opposed to having this speech broadcast are opposed to anything that President Obama is for, regardless of what it is. If he were to proclaim the sky blue and the grass green, they would claim he was trying to socialize nature and then they’d demand he hold a town hall so they could show up and yell about it.

Harford County Maryland is not going to broadcast the speech because they claim they are required to review it first to determine appropriateness.

Um, excuse me, but the speech is available RIGHT NOW (as it was yesterday) all over the internet. What are you waiting for?

I’ve heard arguments that boil down to this”
*He’s too liberal.
*He’s destroying the country.
*I don’t like his policies.

OK, that’s all fine and good, but it’s also totally irrelevant. Even if I agreed with those points, that doesn’t preclude the guy from having something valid to say. Believe me, I disagree with just about everything that President Shrub did, from raping the environment, to rolling back civil rights, to using the Justice Department as a political weapon, to letting religion dictate scientific and social policy, to covertly bring in oil industry cronies to formulate the country’s energy policy, to filling the pockets of the executives in the oil, drug, defense and insurance industries, to starting an unnecessary war… geez, I could go on for pages…

But if GW were broadcasting a speech to children calling for them to work hard in school, I say let the man speak. I may hate him, but he is still the President. This was a total non-issue when President Reagan and President Daddy-Bush did the exact same thing during their Presidencies. Both had their detractors, no doubt, but there was no second thought about whether it was appropriate to speak directly to the nation’s children.

Let’s see, what’s in the speech…
*Work hard in school. Go to class and listen.
*Set goals for yourself. Develop your talents.
*It’s up to you to make yourself better.
*A tiny percent of you may be a movie star or top athlete, so it’s best you get an education.

Aren’t those things that Republicans are always screaming for? Individual responsibility? Hard work? Only when they’re trying to keep poor people from getting help, I guess.

It just goes to show that they won’t even let Obama agree with them. It further goes to show what happens when you have a morally bankrupt platform and thorough lack of new ideas.

I’ve heard it posited in different forums that it’s a racist thing.

I think there may be a grain of truth to that, but I think that in this case, racism is surpassed by politics. The right just doesn’t want the President to succeed with anything, even with something they embrace. They’re so busy posturing about not destroying America or what it means to be American; they can’t see that their actions are doing just that.

And that, my friends, is hypocrisy at it’s purest.

There’s a difference between dissenting and shouting down everyone that doesn’t agree. People keep talking about compromising… I tell you, there can be no compromise when one side is only interested in securing the failure of the other. No matter how many people are hurting when the country goes down the tubes because of it, all the better come election time.

That’s the real lesson that “the children” are being taught right now by this asinine charade.