Ah, indoctrination.

The left loves to talk about how America has been historically guilty of it.  Every time a kid stands up, puts his hand over his heart, and recites the Pledge of Allegiance, he is being manipulated to love this country of ours, overshadowing the past American imperialist and human rights crimes that kids should be focused on.  

And the indoctrination doesn't end there, they claim.  Once these apple pie-loving robots leave the secondary schools, they continue their right-wing education on the airwaves of talk radio, where independent instructors are hired by private companies to compensate for the learning that they fail to get in those state-sponsored universities.  Poor Joe Six-pack, don'tcha know, didn't have the benefit of learning the truths of the world from a college professor whose "coming-of-age" years could best be described as a montage of group sex and psychedelic acid trips set to "Time of the Season" by The Zombies.

Yet when educational institutions are systematically teaching their young children to chant phrases supporting Barack Obama's political agenda...well, there's just no harm in that.  Schoolchildren singing in support of the notion of "spreading the wealth around": "Hooray, Mr. President! We honor your great plans to make this country's economy number one again!"  Children too young to know the meaning or implications of Obama's proposed "change" involving  expansive government infrastructure, yet creepily singing: "Obama's gonna change it, Obama's gonna lead 'em, we're gonna change it, and rearrange it."  And most recently, children innocently singing the nonpartisan phrase "Who do we know is the man?  Barack Obama is our man!  He's our man, yes he can!"

All this, though...it's all innocent in the eyes of the left.  After all, don't you remember the schoolchildren singing: "Who's the greatest in the land? Why, Bush, of course, he's our man!"  You don't?  It never happened?  Oh well, that doesn't matter.  Because now Barack Obama is president, and you're just supposed to support him.  Sheesh.

Of course, Talk Radio U. teaches those conservative robots to be wary about schoolchildren being uniformly instructed to sing praises to the president.  Sure, Barack Obama takes opportunities to pitch increased federal education spending to schoolchildren in hopes they might get their archaic old parents on the trolley with the whole "hope and change" thing.  But that doesn't mean he's trying to charge their thoughts with his brand of politics.  No big deal, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  It is manipulation of the highest order -- indoctrination meant to support the politicians and positions of the left.  And it's evolving.  It's not just in the mainstream media anymore.  It's not just in the public schools.  It's soon to be on every social network -- the greatest propaganda campaign ever tweeted.  It is just described as "grassroots communication."

ABC News reports:

The Obama campaign is today beginning a new effort to enlist and educate at least 2 million supporters for a "grassroots communications team" they're calling the Truth Team.

"The goal is to ensure that when Republicans attack President Obama's record, grassroots supporters can take ownership of the campaign and share the facts with the undecided voters in their lives," the campaign said in a statement.

Of course, grassroots implies an initiative by the people, bottom-up, free of top-down influence, which is a curious description considering that this is actually an Obama campaign initiative.  But anyway, here's how this unapologetically works.  A nonpartisan, independent reader comes across this article.  He reads in this post something that doesn't exactly paint Obama in a good light.  Better do some fact-checking, he thinks.  He goes to an Obama Truth Team outlet online, saying, "I heard that Barack Obama wants children to take the political ideology they're learning at school home to challenge their parents' ideas."  The millions of Obama's trained Truth experts, fed its "truth" by the ruling political regime and eerily reminiscent of the Ministry of Truth in the dystopian novel 1984, reply, "Of course not.  That's just a conservative lie meaning to dress our administration with the trappings of totalitarianism."

Of course, I link evidence above of Obama doing this very thing, and the horse's mouth should absolve me.  But that doesn't matter.  Why do any thinking for yourself when the Obama's Truth Team can do it for you?

There is a well-known maxim that goes: "A lie, told often enough, becomes truth."  And with millions of government-sanctioned propaganda distributors charged with taking the government's message to various social media in today's world, it can spread millions upon millions of lies each day.  It seems that technology has vastly improved the efficiency with which an ambitious and power-hungry government can disperse the lies it disguises as "truth."

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government."  -John Stuart Mill

William Sullivan blogs at politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com, and he can now be followed on Twitter.