Just you wait, my pretties

I just watched Obama's speech to American schoolchildren that Roo and Lumpy were not able to see because of a "longstanding policy" here in the Teabag School District mandating that stuff from the real world that might interfere with predetermined lesson plans should not be brought into the classroom. (I'm sure Christa McAuliffe would have been proud.) This "longstanding policy," of course, was news to us, although its implementation at the threat of having a black man say something to children about the benefits of education stands in a bold mainstream American tradition dating back to the days of Frederick Douglass.

So, having actually seen and heard what he had to say, I must share my shock: No hammer-and-sickle banners! No brown shirts! No kindergarten death squads! No opening act performing a third trimester abortion! WTF??

In parsing the president's words, I have to conclude that atheistic socialism will corrupt the hearts and minds of our children in the following ways: 

**Having them respect their parents and their teachers;

**Having them be diligent in their studies;

**Having them take responsibility for their work and their learning;

**Having them take what they learn and use it in service to their country and communities.

I felt like Dith Pran in The Killing Fields, watching Pol Pot and his lackeys make Cambodian children praise Angka and march around chanting "Death to the rich! Death to our parents!" Even as I type, I'm pretty sure I hear the screams from the science building as rampaging kids from the campus daycare center impale professors on the plastic knives and forks they stole from lunch. "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!"

To quote the ideological master of the movement that saved my children from seeing this, "What a world! What a world!" Lumpy and Roo come from a place where reports unfavorable to the government are blocked from public view...and move to a place where people who don't like the government can preemptively block the president from public view, in the guise of a "longstanding policy." And this is democracy and civic responsibility -- how? 

If only we could throw buckets of water and make this ugliness melt away. But that can only happen in Oz...a land, it appears, far over a rainbow from our own.