Making a political decision based on some perceived fault in the identity of some person with an affection for the candidate is just silly.
The Superintendent responds (video link).
Leave our kids alone!
Well, that makes sense, considering His Dark Holy Worker Revolutionary Herr Obama’s policy of soul-stealing, racial cleansing and endless war with Eastasia.
Wait, maybe it wasn’t him who wanted the endless war with Eastasia. Well, shit, I can never keep these guys straight.
Yet, somehow, you’re completely unable to figure out President-Elect Obama’s platform, despite the fact that it has been clearly spelled out on his website(s) for months on end and you took a class that seemed to evaluate his candidacy endlessly. I think that says more about you than the President-Elect.
Well, to be fair, McCain probably lost because of this disadvantage among the key under-18 demographic.
What’s the point of this thread?
You’d rather she lied to the kid? It is a senseless war.
To froth but not bring forth.
I believe it’s the first in a series of 65,319,143 threads about how all Obama supporters are glassy-eyed ideologues. I can’t possibly imagine how this “deserves a mention” – isolated reports of idiocy don’t impress me all that much.
The point would be, I think, that however one feels about the war, McCain did NOT say he wanted 100 more years of it. In fact, he specifically disavowed just such a circumstance. This teacher misrepresented McCain’s position–bad enough–but did so in front of a bunch of impressionable kids. Perhaps not the crime of the century, but not proper behavior for a teacher.
I feel very bad for the girl in the video and what the teacher did was completely inappropriate.
This is another empty political move by the right, similar to the marketing maneuvers against the media. Damn libs in education, gotta beware of the indoctrination!
No, I don’t doubt that things like this happen with a left and a right basis. But turning it into an orchestrated attack on an institution is more Rovian bullshit. My favorite routines are when a student calls Hannity and decries a teacher’s denial of Hannity’s rhetorical correctness.
It’s marketing marketing marketing people…DNFTT
Well, I am, believe me, as liberal as the next guy, but I am frothing at the mouth. Ideological indoctrination of any kind in school disgusts me, regardless of how much I can agree or disagree with the general ideological bent.
I do realize that teachers are human, and that their personal ideas will always show one way or the other, but there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and this teacher went way too far. Count me with the ones against this.
I get that, but that’s got nothing to do with the point I responded to.
Saying Iraq is a senseless war or pointing out that McCain said he wanted to keep troops there for 100 years is just a teacher teaching facts. Those are not opinions.
One cannot help but agree with Diogenes the Cynic in this particular instance. The school superintendent is obviously a Republican, and one can reasonably infer that he has seized the opportunity to hype this incident in order to reflect unfavorably on blacks in particular and Democrats as a whole.
How so? Simple. The rhetoric of the right is recognizable by its divisive nature. The superintendent has chosen to divide the world into military families, military children, and military teachers as somehow apart from ordinary families, children, and teachers. These aren’t ordinary people, he tells us. These are special people who are our “heroes”. Those who would take the side of the black nonmilitary teacher are anti-American by implication. And once again, we find ourselves as patriots versus subversives.
I would recommend that Democrats and people of the left do not jerk so instantly through some abstract sense of fairness and level playing fields without first thinking about how something might be an exception, as in this case. The teacher did nothing wrong. This event is not equivalent to some of the caricatures being offered as analogies.
Principled people on the left should stand their ground here.
Not that I want to discourage a single one from staying active and invested, but apparently “Young voters not essential to Obama triumph”.
The cynical side of me says that this should come as no surprise as a dogmatic mess is pretty much what political discourse has turned into in this country. When the parents and students can do nothing but rant against their opposition or wave banners for their team, how can we reasonably fault teachers for doing the same?
When I was in high school, I was most impressed by one US history teacher I had. It was generally clear what his political views were, and he expressed them, but never in a “this is what you should think,” sort of way. It was more of a “this is what I think. Now, what do you think, and why?”
Please. Obama’s own advisors frequently contradicted themselves and each other with public policy statements. I’m not talking about hs “official” platform, which these days often has nothing to do with the actual platform. You can say the man is good or whatnot, but you can’t rationally claim to know what policies he favors because he’s expressly avoided setting forth any clear statement. Heck, in his own autobiography, he describes how and why he does this.
Come on, let’s be fair. Much as I personally tend to agree with you, neither one of these things are facts.
The adjective senseless, by its very nature, is an opinion. There are people whose opinion it is that we are defending democracy over there. Just like Viet Nam - you and I “know” they’re wrong, and they “know” they’re right. To them, the war being senseless is not a fact. Something that isn’t a fact to everyone isn’t a fact.
And again in all fairness, McCain did not say he “wanted” troops there for 100 years. Someone asked him about Bush’s statement that troops could be there for 50 years and he said “maybe 100.” As long as they were basically a formality like we have in Japan, Germany, and Korea, and no violence was occurring. Making it sound like he wanted the war to continue for the next 100 years is just disingenuous and especially unnecessary now that the election is over and he lost.
He said “make it a hundred,” not “maybe a hundred.” That to me shows desire.
As to the “senselessness” of the war, mayube “purposeless” would be a better word. It is at least a fact that none of the reasons we were told we needed to invade Iraq turned out to be true. It is factual that we invaded – in retrospect – for no defensive purpose. It was an invasion launcehed with no casus belli, and no defensive reason to continue the occupation.