Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [14]
The document described many nauseating discussion questions like:
• What is the president trying to tell me?
• What is the president asking me to do?
• What new ideas and actions is the president challenging me to think about?
• Note: The fourth question has been redacted for liability reasons. It has been included in small print in the footnote. Pregnant women, the elderly, and readers with a history of stomach problems are advised to avert their eyes as they arrive at the bottom of the page.n
The story then floated around the conservative blogosphere for a couple of days, possibly contributing to a spike in sales of Pepto-Bismol, before the Drudge Report found it and pinned the headline to the middle of its news site, sparking a national conflagration of paranoid hysteria.
Jim Greer, chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, led the way with an outraged press release the same day. Calling Obama a “Pied Piper,” Greer angrily denounced the president’s designs on his children in a press release:
As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology . . . President Obama has turned to American’s [sic] children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American’s [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.o2
The next day, Fox News, smelling a ratings winner, followed suit with full-throated condemnations of the planned speech. Sean Hannity expressed concern to Michelle Malkin that the whole idea seemed “very close to indoctrination.”3 Malkin replied with a discourse on the left’s exploitation of schoolchildren “as guinea pigs and as junior lobbyists for their social liberal agenda.” On The O’Reilly Factor, commentator Monica Crowley dabbled in dystopia: “Look, just when you think that this administration can’t get any more surreal and Orwellian, here he comes to indoctrinate our children.”4 Evidently, Ms. Crowley has a limited imagination when it comes to dystopian nightmares.
Glenn Beck, however, has no such limitations, and he gleefully used the opportunity to flog his own imaginative dystopian conspiracy theories:
Gang, you have a system that is wildly, wildly out of control, and they are capturing your kids. As Van Jones himself has said, the earlier we get the kids, the earlier we make this adjustment with the youth, the easier this transition is going to be. Stand guard America. Your republic is under attack.5
Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh were both on vacation the first week of September (coincidence?), so their initial thoughts on the back-to-school threat went sadly unrecorded.
Conservative parents across the nation reacted with alarm to the news of the planned indoctrination program. Many vowed to keep their children home on the day of the speech to protect their impressionable young minds from socialist taint. A grassroots Twitter drive was originally called National Skip Day but later modified to the slightly more responsible-sounding and acronym-friendly “Parentally Approved Skip School Day.”6 Many schools allowed students to opt out of the televised speech. Others refused to show it at all.7
A week later, as protestors gathered outside a Virginia high school with placards that read “Mr. President, Stay Away from Our Kids,” Obama delivered his “unprecedented address”p to schools across the country.8 The speech was crammed full with socialist agitprop, like “Here in America, you write your own destiny” and “I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.”9 Schoolchildren across the nation were reportedly inspired to pursue their own destinies and wash their hands regularly for the rest of the day.
If the brouhaha over Obama’s speech strikes you as much ado about nothing, then you are obviously not a conservative partisan in the thrall of persecution politics. According to the paranoid right’s world-view, there is a secret progressive conspiracy