Too Many Kooks

[question everything]

Forbes.com

Too Many Kooks
Tunku Varadarajan, 09.07.09

The Silly Season ceases to be "silly" when what passes for political debate in America turns not merely stupid or witless, but certifiably demented. I write of the kooky reaction of many conservatives--politicians, citizens and commentators in the media--to the plan by President Obama to address the nation's schoolchildren tomorrow. (And I write, please note, as a nonlefty libertarian who did not support Barack Obama in the presidential election.)

Obama will, as we all know, address our kids--plenty of whom need a lesson or two on the subject, since they clearly don't get it from their parents--on the virtues of study, education and hard work. According to a White House spokesman, the aim of the speech is "to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, doing their homework ..." If anyone thinks that's unpalatable, subversive, Commie and un-American, I'd like to meet for a duel at dawn by the skating rink at New York's Central Park. (Pick your weapon, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck ...)

(snip)

What to make of this conniption, for example, from Steve Russell, a Republican Oklahoma state senator? "As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education--it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality. This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq." Kim-Jong Obama? You reckon? I concluded not, opting, instead, for the view that the senator had taken leave of his senses. Kooky, too, was the paroxysm from Jim Greer, the chairman of the GOP in Florida, no less: He was "absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology." And Rick Perry, the governor of Texas--a man I'd never call a kook, and I don't propose to do so now, even though he has made some common cause with kooks on this issue--has said that he understood where the criticism of Obama was coming from. Perry, however, was at pains to point out that he's "certainly not going to advise anybody not to send their kids to school ."

(snip)

Not so long ago, it was the right's indignant lament that Democrats did not accord sufficient respect to the president of the United States. The president in question happened to be the right's president, and Democrats, it is true, were universally dismissive of him, treating him with a contumely that brought them no credit. Overheated sections of the right--first the "birthers," now the "speechers"--are meting out to Obama precisely the sort of disrespectful treatment they execrated when it was directed by the left at President Bush. (How refreshing it would be, I say, and how restorative of civic decency, if George W. Bush were to make a statement today urging his party to accept an American president's right to connect directly with America's schoolchildren. After all, what was Bush doing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001? And didn't his father speak to America's schoolchildren in 1991?)

Call me naïve, but I believe that Americans ought to accord their president a formal, ex officio respect, irrespective of party affiliation. He is, after all, the president of all of us (whether we like him or not), and it is unseemly that we should withhold civility from him on grounds of political disagreement. As things stand, no blow seems low enough, no criticism off limits, if the president happens to be from the other side. The pursuit of happiness has given way to the pursuit of picayune point-scoring. E Pluribus Unum ... Why do we still bother with that silly foreign phrase? Our great nation has become a Manichaean nation.

Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at NYU's Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, is executive editor for opinions at Forbes. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/06/obama-school-speech-malkin-rick-perry-opinions-columnists-tunku-varadarajan.html

[tsuki]

1. Too many kooks -- 24 hour cable news?? nt

[orpupilofnature57]

2. Fire!!!!! in a crowded theater ,Cheap

[scarletwoman]

3. At least some on the right are decent enough to be embarrassed by the antics of their confreres.

Not a bad piece, although the obligatory "the left behaved just as badly toward bush* as the right is behaving toward Obama now" false equivolancy is just as infuriating as it always is.

[question everything]

4. Funny thing. I posted it on another board dominated by RWers

and the first comment was about "liberals" so I had to point out that the writer is with the Hoover Inst. and Forbes..

[scarletwoman]

5. They hate intelligence. Ergo, anyone speaking intelligently must be the enemy. (nt)

[struggle4progress]

6. Y'know, it's kinda like when the guy, who thinks he's Napoleon, tells ya, "That guy,

who thinks he's God, isn't like you and me: he's crazy!"