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PrintSeptember 26, 2009
NJ video proves Obama's school-speech opponents right
The video of New Jersey teachers drilling schoolchildren to chant paeans to "Barack Hussein Obama"--adult Obamatons training impressionable children to become little Obamatons--proves that conservatives were right to oppose Barack Obama's nationwide speech to school children.
No, Obama didn't try to convert them on particular policy decisions when he spoke to students earlier this month, but no thoughtful person believed he would. Despite attempts by the Democrat Party's Big Media wing to portray opponents as paranoid, we didn't send kids to school wearing aluminum-foil hats to prevent Obama's broadcast from filtering into their brains--although I have suspicions that the sportscaster at MSNBC may have worn such a contraption during the Bush years.
But what was apparent then, and the New Jersey video proves now, is that Obama's unfettered direct access to students was part of an effort to inculcate a cult of personality about Obama. After all, Obama was elected primarily because the media worshipped at the cult they created around him. Well, that and about a billion of George Soros's dollars. 'Hope' and 'change' being no substitute for an actual platform.
The real motive behind Obama's school address was demonstrated by the infamous 'lesson plan' developed by the Department of Education, which asked students to write about how they could help Obama. That instruction was eventually deleted after word of it leaked out and large segments of the public protested, but other, blatant cult-of-personality instructions remained in the lesson plan:
*Teachers may post in large print around the classroom notable quotes excerpted from President Obama’s speeches on education.
*Based on these excerpts, what can we infer that the president believes is important in order to be educationally successful?
*Teachers may ask students to think of the following: Why does President Obama want to speak with us today? How will he inspire us?
*Teachers might conduct a 'listening with purpose' exercise based on the following ideas: personal responsibility, goals, and persistence. Teachers might ask pairs of students to create a word bank... to increase retention and deepen their understanding of an important aspect of the speech.
*Teachers... could focus students on quotations that either propose a specific challenge to them or that inspire them in some meaningful way. Students could do this activity individually, in pairs, or in groups.*Is President Obama inspiring you to do anything? Is he challenging you to do anything? (Emphasis added.)
Much of the lesson plan specifies class discussion in front of the students' teachers. How much of that classroom discussion was directed by the same sort of teachers who were organizing the students in that New Jersey video? Do you have any doubts about how those discussions went?
This even as the Obama administration's profligate spending bankrupts the students' futures.
The New Jersey video, showing teachers teaching kids to sing paeans to "Barack Hussein Obama," has been described as bone-chilling. Some have said that it evokes nightmarish memories of Hitler youth, others have observed that it reeks of the adoration drummed into Chinese youth for Chairman Mao.
To this journalist, it called up other memories, not so much from the pictures, but of the rote chant. "Mmm, mmm, mmmm, Barack Hussein Obama." Voices drone on and on. I couldn't help but think of a single voice some years ago, monotonously urging his followers to drink the Kool-Aid.
William Tate is an award-winning journalist and author
