Right to Opine

Why did we keep our daughter home from school today? So we could watch the President’s speech with her and provide corrections where necessary. You can be sure our public schools will not balance their adulation of The One with anything approaching reality.

After last week’s firestorm of protests over the supplemental materials provided to teachers, President Obama gave a rather bland and predictable speech to our nation’s students this morning. (The prepared text can be found here.) The problem with his speech wasn’t what he said, but that he didn’t mean it.

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 you don’t really mean it. It’s one thing to claim to set high standards. It’s another entirely to enforce those standards. One of your biggest backers, the NEA, opposes enforcement of standards (i.e., failing students and denying graduation). As a state senator, U.S. senator, and now as president, you have done absolutely nothing to change that. Without enforcement standards are meaningless. Your record speaks for itself.

My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had.

But you know that’s only a half-truth. The fact is, you were largely raised by your maternal grandparents, one of whom was vice president of a bank. You didn’t grow up poor. You didn’t grow up disadvantaged. You grew up in a comfortable neighborhood in Hawaii and chose to waste your time hanging around a Marxist mentor and smoking dope. Puhlease.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

Ah, if only you really believed that. If you did, you’d support eliminating affirmative action and other racial quotas. You’d support reducing government expenditures on welfare and entitlement programs. You’d insist that college admissions and job opportunities be given to the best qualified candidate, not the most racially diverse candidate. But you don’t. Instead you support expanding entitlement programs, encouraging future generations to rely more and more on the government rather than themselves. You have put zero pressure on universities and corporations to give rewards to those who have earned them.

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.

But we’re not allowed to let kids fail, even when they don’t do their work at all, much less when they do it but poorly. Instead we pass them on from grade to grade and they never learn from their failure because they aren’t allowed to fail.

If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave.

Um, actually, I think that is a pretty obvious definition of a troublemaker. (From Merriam-Webster: trou-ble-mak-er, n., a person who consciously or unconsciously causes trouble.) Quit with the touchy-feely stuff, sir, and just tell them to shape up. Of course, there have to be consequences or they won’t, so never mind. Keep the feel-good slop flowing.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day.

Yes, but the group you ask for help includes Marxists, tax cheats, racists, etc. Hopefully our kids will choose wiser advisors.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation.

And let’s all recall what that revolution was about…taxes! A sobering history lesson for you, Mr. President, as we host our TEA parties across the nation.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Um, why isn’t the ACLU up in arms over this? A high school valedictorian can’t mention God in a graduation speech but you give your homeboy a pass? To quote our fearless leader, “Enough!”