In the world of right wing talk radio hosts, San Diego’s Rick Roberts has to keep ahead of the curve. His daily show on KFMB-AM Radio ranks behind competitor KOGO-AM (Chip Franklin) and his audience is pretty much limited to the teabagger fringes of the Republican rank and file.  Need to know what topics will be covered on his show this week?  Just surf over to any of the Fox News discussion boards and look for the most inflammatory material: that’s what you’ll be hearing on the show this week.  

 Basking in the glory of helping out his buddy Congressman Darrell Issa (and regular recipient of Big Pharma/Healthcare PAC $$) fill a couple of “Town Halls” this past week, Rick wants you to know about the next big thing on the horizon: a boycott of schools on September 8th.

  That’s because President Obama is making a speech next week aimed at school kids.  In a recent interview with student reporter, Damon Weaver, President Obama announced that on September 8 — the first day of school for many children across America — he will deliver a national address directly to students on the importance of education. The President will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning.

 So “Stay in school” is being called “indoctrination” and an attempt to “get ’em while they’re young,”.  Roberts, along with Glen Beck and the usual collection of tin foil hat wearing pundits are now warning, “They are capturing your kids” and “your republic is under attack.”

 It’s not that other sitting Presidents haven’t done pretty much the same thing.

 Roberts and his cohorts apparently have forgotten that, while president, George H.W. Bush gave a speech to schoolchildren intended “to motivate America’s students to strive for excellence; to increase students’ as well as parents’ responsibility/accountability; and to promote students’ and parents’ awareness of the educational challenge we face.” The White House sent letters to schools across the nation to encourage teachers and principals to allow students to tune in the speech; live television and radio coverage was arranged at the request of the Education Department.

 Also forgotten is former President George W. Bush posting a “teacher’s guide” on the White House website intended to help students understand the “freedom timeline” and encouraging them to “explor[e] the biographies of the President, Mrs. Bush, Vice President, and Mrs. Cheney.”  Of course, we’ll never forget the seven minutes that President Bush took out to continue reading to school children in front of TV cameras after learning that the World Trade Center had been bombed.

 Then there’s Ronald Reagan’s “educational” event on November 14, 1988, where he addressed and took questions from students from middle schools at the Old Executive Office Building. The speech was broadcast live and rebroadcast by C-Span, and Instructional Television Network fed the program to schools nationwide over three different days. Part of the President’s speech that day included a discourse on supply side economics and reduced taxation, plus a spiel about gun control.

How long did it take the right to go from: “if you criticize the President you are a traitor” to “School children should not trust the President”? So President Obama speaks to the nation’s youth and it’s:

The fascist in chief is taking his special brand of brainwashing to the classroom. Keep your kids home. I think this man is a threat to our basic unalienable rights. I don’t want him indoctrinating my children. Seriously.

Ask your school what their participation is in this leftist indoctrination outrage. Keep politics out of the classroom. Keep communists and their propagandists away from small children

 

And….

Unless we get public assurances from the White House that the president won’t address health care or global warming or the homosexual agenda (under the color of “human rights for people different than us”) this might be a great time for parents to exercise their opt-out authority and give their students a biography of George Washington to read while the President turns the minds of an entire generation to mush.

The difference is, when the right wingers used to go on about how everyone should respect the President they really meant that they would only respect Presidents that they liked.

The other difference is, this President is black.  Maybe they avoid letting their children see Obama on TV because they’re afraid their kids will get the image of a black President in their minds and might think it is OK.  That might be the “indoctrination” they’re worried about.

Or maybe it’s that this President has “secret powers” that allow him to sway minds in a 15 minute speech.  But I don’t think so.  The American people voted Dick “secret powers” Cheney’s party out of office.

So, in the spirit of this sort of ongoing over-the-top righty responses, we’d like to propose a few more White House initiatives:

**National Dental Health Day.  That way, Roberts & his crew could claim there is a nationwide conspiracy of dentists seeking to implant transmitters in the teeth of “true patriots”.

** A Presidential speech announcing that the world is, in fact, round.  It’d be nice to get the flat earth society types out of the closet.

cross posted with cool graphics at obrag.org