Boehlert makes an important point about this ridiculous school speech business:
Projecting The Zeitgeist
by digby
Tim Rutten has a good piece in the Los Angeles Times about “the bizarre controversy” surrounding Obama’s planned speech to U.S. school children and the unhinged right-wing response about how the President of the United States was going to “indoctrinate” students by urging them to achieve excellence. Rutten is dead-on when he notes the inherent danger behind the ugliness. Unfortunately, Rutten lets the serious, mainstream press off the hook. (Fox News clearly doesn’t fall into that category.) The fact is you can’t really bemoan how the this ‘controversy’ has become a big deal without noting it’s the press that’s turned it into one. This loony tunes conspiracy theory has only gained traction because the corporate press won’t stop writing and talking about it. Because reporters and pundits have legitimized it. They’ve rewarded the nuts who concocted the phony story in the first place. And yes, I’m talking about corporate press outlets like the Los Angeles Times, which propped up the school nonsense as big news in its Friday edition with this headline:
Planned school speech by Obama hits resistance; The address will focus on student success, the White House says. But one critic denounces a ‘socialist ideology.
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I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant since I’ve seen quite a few mainstream gasbags denounce the hissy fit, but lo and behold, here’s CNN today:
The White House is set to release on Monday the text of a controversial back-to-school speech to students from President Obama that has angered some conservative parents and pundits.
The uproar over President Obama’s back-to-school speech has led the White House to release the transcript.
The uproar over President Obama’s back-to-school speech has led the White House to release the transcript.
The text of the 18-minute speech will be posted on the White House Web site so people can read it before its scheduled Internet broadcast to schoolchildren Tuesday.
Some conservatives have expressed a fear that Obama is going to use the opportunity to press a partisan political agenda.
“Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me,” suburban Colorado mother Shanneen Barron told CNN Denver affiliate KMGH. “I’m an American. They are Americans, and I don’t feel that’s OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now.”
I know how she feels. I had the same reaction when George W. Bush was on television every five minute launching invasions of other countries for no good reason and yammering on about how oceans once protected us and now drone planes with biological weapons were coming to kill us all in our beds. It’s easy to understand why this woman would be equally freaked out by the president trying to make sure everyone can go to a doctor when they get sick. It’s scary stuff.
There’s a part of all this that’s simply a matter of the right riding the existing zeitgeist. For years liberals loudly denounced the neocons for their megalomania, warning about the ramifications of an America that has become a rogue superpower, torturing, invading and spying on its own citizens. It was a violent, frightening time with some real world consequences that are still not fully understood or absorbed.
The right, with their pretense of assuming the moral positions of their opposition, twisting their rhetoric to suit their own needs and basically use the other sides’ own methods against them, have simply jumped on the bandwagon now that their boy is gone. These people are posing as civil libertarians afraid of an authoritarian take-over,something we all have felt recently. Because they’ve absorbed all the fear and concern of the past years, even as they rejected it, they are now able to emotionally apply it to the president they hate and it has the same emotional resonance, even if it is completely ludicrous.
After all, everybody knows that the government is authoritarian in a number of different ways. The right uses this to confuse the people who feel the free floating anxiety in the culture at large and have emotionally internalized all the anti-Cheney rhetoric of the past eight years into fear of government programs that can help them. It’s quite impressive that they can do it, but when you see the help the press continues to give them it’s not altogether surprising.
These guys are blandly passing out all these paranoid fantasies without properly examining just how bizarre they really are. Obama’s speech to kids is only “controversial” because a bunch of fruitcakes and opportunists are treating the president of the United States like he’s some kind of pervert who can’t be trusted to speak to their children. I think that’s pretty awful and the media should not be validating this stuff, particularly when it makes no fucking sense!
The irony is that back when it might have actually helped to have the press validating the anti-government rhetoric, before the Iraq war, they blacked us out. I guess they won’t be repeating that journalistic mistake by blacking out people who think that presidential speeches about hard work and perseverance to schoolchildren are communist plots. It’s always interesting how they choose to apply their lessons.
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