Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said today that, because of angry town hallers and the like, President Obama should show "humility" when he speaks to Congress Wednesday night.
"What you're seeing is folks on my side anxious to see what the president has to say tomorrow night," Chambliss said. "I think he's gonna have to express some humility based on what we've seen around the country this August and that's not his inclination."
The implication here is that Chambliss's side -- the one that opposes much of the Democrats' reform plan, especially a public option -- is winning, and that the president had better be humble.
Video after the jump.
- John Cole adds - Or What?
You’ll all vote no? Dick Armey and Freedomworks will pay for a wingnut bus across the country? Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter will scribble something barely legible on Facebook? You’ll hold your breath? What exactly are you all going to do? You’ve already cranked up the crazy to max.
You know, there is a really rowdy debate about the future of health care going on, but it is all happening internally inside the Democratic party with occasional input from Olympia Snowe. All the Republicans are doing are throwing spitballs and making lame threats, although in fairness, Chuck Grassley does show up on TV every now and then to debate the position he had 24 hours earlier.
At any rate, I guess we should just be happy Saxby didn’t channel fellow Georgian Lynn Westmoreland and tell Obama he better not be uppity.
Here's an interesting little story:
Ky. school trip included baptisms
By Andrew Wolfson, The (Louisville) Courier Journal
LOUISVILLE — A mother is angry about a trip led by the head football coach at Breckinridge County High School. The coach took about 20 players on a school bus late last month to his church, where nearly half of them — including her son — were baptized.Michelle Ammons said her 16-year-old son was baptized without her knowledge and consent, and she is upset that a public school bus was used to take players to a church service — and that the school district's superintendent was there and did not object.
"Nobody should push their faith on anybody else," said Ammons, whose son, Robert Coffey, said Coach Scott Mooney told him and other players that the Aug. 26 outing would include only a motivational speaker and a free steak dinner.
What do you think the odds are that Breckinridge County schools aren't showing the Obama speech today, on the claim that it's an indoctrination exercise?
Truthfully, it hardly matters what they're doing with the speech, considering the problems surprise baptism parties pose all by themselves. But wouldn't it be especially ironic if they weren't showing it, because they were worried about indoctrination?
Sargent: “Obama’s Controversial Speech Urges Students To Wash Their Hands”
This headline from the Palm Beach Post on Obama’s speech to students really deserves some kind of award:
Text of Obama’s controversial speech urges students to succeed, work hard, wash their hands
That headline, with its juxtaposition of the word “controversial” with Obama’s insistence that kids work hard and keep their hands clean, wonderfully captures the absurdity of the whole speech battle. It’s really a pitch-perfect parody of the deep respect and seriousness granted to conservative claims about the speech by some in the media. Simply sublime.
Right wing mother cries on CNN - Hilarious Parody
Blue Texan: Liberal Media Characterizes Obama’s Back to School Speech as “Controversial”
You really have to hand it to the right-wing. They know how to work the refs.
Let's review: (1) White House announces speech to school kids; (2) wingnuts fling lots of poo for the hell of it; (3) speech predictably turns out to be totally innocuous; (4) press regurgitates wingnut poo.
It's genius.
WSJ:
Obama Delivers Controversial School Speech
ABC:
Obama to Push Personal Responsibility in Controversial School Speech
South Florida schoolchildren to watch controversial Obama speech
Speech to Students Causing Controversy
Text of Obama's controversial speech urges students to succeed, work hard, wash their hands
NBC:
Kansas schools deal with Obama address controversy
Obama school speech text: What Glenn Beck may not like
White House wades in to calm Obama school speech uproar
And yet, despite this massive propaganda victory, wingnuts like The Hair will still complain that the media doesn't ingest enough wingnut poo, thereby greasing the tracks for the next wingnut poo flinging.
Very impressive, yes?
E.J. Dionne: Staying in School and the 'Socialist Agenda'
We have just gone through one of the most shameful episodes of the young Obama presidency -- shameful because of the behavior of the right wing, shameful because the media played into an extremist agenda, shameful because we proved that our political system has become so dysfunctional that a president gets punished for doing the right thing.
Upon Barack Obama’s election, even my most conservative friends who supported John McCain said Obama could do a world of good for poor children in the country by stressing the importance of education, hard work, staying in school and taking responsibility. Yes, those are often thought of as conservative values.
But when Obama proposed to do just that on the first day of school, the far right -- without asking any questions or seeking any information -- decided to pounce, on the theory that everything Obama did should be attacked relentlessly as part of some secret and dangerous ideological agenda.
Out popped Jim Greer, the Florida Republican chairman, who accused the president of trying to “indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda."
In a normal world, the media would have asked Greer for proof of such a wild charge and, since he didn’t have any, his press release would have gone into the circular file.
But, no, the media is so petrified of being criticized for being “liberal” that it chose to take a lunatic charge seriously and helped gin up this phony controversy.
The only rationale for assailing Obama was a single line in a long memo from the Department of Education listing eight steps that students could take to further their goals. It listed the categories for those goals as “personal, academic, community, country."
Far from encouraging students to fight for a political agenda, the guidelines emphasized that teachers should focus on “personal and academic” goals. Then came the “controversial” sentences: “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."
In validating their decision to allow the madcap right to dominate several news cycles with their attacks on Obama, many reporters and commentators kept repeating that all this was the fault of that single sentence written by Education Department “bureaucrats” -- as if this sentence was reason enough to give wide publicity to an outright lie about what Obama was up to.
In context, it was absolutely clear that the supposedly offending sentence was in no way about politics. But just to make sure, the Education Department rewrote the passage to clarify that the students’ letters should focus on their “short-term and long-term education goals.” Yes, it would have been nice if the Ed Department had used such a sentence in the first place. (In general, it would be nice if memos of this sort were written in plain English.) But nothing in the original document justified the paranoia the far right let loose.
And, of course, Obama’s speech was not at all “political” in any conventional definition of that word. It was about highlighting the importance of individual achievement. Here is an example of the president’s “socialist” propaganda, from the text of his speech:
I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world -- and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.If that’s “socialist,” then Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and just about every parent in America are “socialists.”
Oh, yes, and after reading the president’s remarks, the aforementioned Jim Greer, the Florida GOP chairman, declared: “It's a good speech. It encourages kids to stay in school and the importance of education, and I think that's what a president should do.”
But not a word of apology for helping set off a dishonest and destructive episode that led who knows how many parents to keep their kids home today or to forbid them from listening to a president urging them to do well in school.
One other point: Defenders of the right-wing argue that the left said terrible things about George W. Bush. That’s true. What the apologists miss is that the deep anger at Bush did not set in until he had been president for several years. Despite the rage over Florida and the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, Bush did not face until much later in his administration anything like the hostility that Obama already confronts. Liberals, staunch liberals, were even willing to work with Bush on some issues -- remember, for example, Ted Kennedy’s work on the “No Child Left Behind” Act.
And the entire country, including almost all of the left, united behind Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (Here, to provide a personal example, is my own column of Oct. 12, 2001. Yes, what I wrote looks naive now, but I’m still glad I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt at that moment.) The far, far left that trashed Bush immediately after 9/11 was isolated and treated as cranky and even subversive by the mainstream media. Note how quickly Van Jones was driven from his administration job for singing that wacky post-9/11 petition. The far left faces much tougher public and media discipline than the far right.
The right-wing decided almost from Day One that a president elected with 53 percent of the vote (and 365 electoral votes) was illegitimate. They are trashing a moderate liberal as a socialist propagandist. They are getting a lot of press coverage for doing so. Where is the accountability?
Am I continuing to be naive in believing that, one of these days, a phalanx of responsible conservatives will stand up to the extremists? Boy, do I miss William F. Buckley Jr.
By E.J. Dionne | September 8, 2009; 1:30 PM ET
Here's Hal Sparks. Very Funny!:
C&L: A teabagger even too dumb for Dr. Nancy on MSNBC about Obama's school speech
By John Amato Tuesday Sep 08, 2009 2:00pm
Why is MSNBC even putting people like this on TV? Dr. Nancy was dumbfounded by what this teabagger had to say about Obama's back to school speech and lesson plans in general.
Nancy: Have you changed your mind since hearing the president today?
Teabagger: No I haven't. I thought the speech was OK, we never really had a problem with the content of the speech. It was always about the lesson plans.
Nancy: And what's the problem with the lesson plans, that the idea is to stay in school and do your work and not let adversity keep you down?
Teabagger: Well, actually the lesson plans as they're presented are actually illegal under the protection of People's Rights
Nancy: But what's your problem with the message?
Teabagger: Well like I said, there is no problem with the message it's the lessons plans that encourages students to reveal personal information about themselves by participating in the lessons that the teachers are putting forth for them and that's illegal....
Nancy: But I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about. No one asked for personal information as far as I understand and the lesson plans really went along with the bulk of the speech.
Teabagger: When the teachers ask in a questionnaires or they encourage the students to reveal information about their goals that delves into the psyche of the children and under code 34 of the federal regulations that's illegal.
Nancy: You must be kidding me. Do you not want kids to be talking about what they want to be when they grow up?
Yes, when a teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I was a kid I said I wanted to be a cop. OMG, that's blasphemy and illegal and I want to sue P.S. 122 in Astoria. I'm sorry, but isn't Obama's speech the reason this teabagger is on my teevee and not the teachers? I guess sometimes they get confused.
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