The lamestream media told you:
The president seemed very presidential as he delivered an inoffensive speech to America’s students from grades kindergarten through 12. Despite dire warning from conservatives before they even heard the speech, there was nothing to fear in the short, harmless, encouraging speech.
The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:
Obama’s speech to America’s school children, as finally written and delivered was excellent, it truly was. The best American values were delivered to students nationwide: study hard, you need schooling to succeed, America’s future depends on you, being a basketball or rap star is not a career plan. It also proved a crucial point: the public can influence the presidency when they speak loudly enough.
1. The classroom materials distributed before the speech outraged the public, and rightly so. Mr. Obama planned an indoctrinating piece of propaganda swamped in political overtones. It is obvious the speech was rewritten after the uproar, because it didn’t match the pre-release materials. The media uniformly failed to mention this, acting as if rewriting is some alien concept, or that it didn’t occur.
2. Although the delivered speech was steeped in decent American values, it broke the ice on the idea that Mr. Obama can directly address children too small to understand what’s happening. The appropriate timing would be during family hour so kids could watch at home with parents.
3. Children do not attend school voluntarily in America anymore — we have a compulsory and sequestered system with harsh penalties for failure to comply for the majority of the public. Forcing a politician’s speech on them under these circumstances is flat out wrong. If president Bush had attempted such a thing we know what the media response would have been. Instead of the gushing media praise we have come to expect for anything Obama, we would have vitriol and invective — which would have been proper for the concept — though it would have no doubt been aimed at the man.
4. By breaking the ice on Obama addresses to young children, the public must now be extremely vigilant for future speeches which may already be planned, and messages that are nowhere near as mellow as the one the public forced the president to change this time around. Don’t expect advance leaks on the next speech. Extreme vigilance in protecting our children is no vice.
5. Because Mr. Obama’s insiders made the mistake of distributing materials ahead of time, the public was alerted and able to assert itself in time. It also established the crucial principle that parents can have their kids opt out of nationally planned agendas in mandatory schools.
6. None of the news media picked up on this. They a) belittled the concern voiced ahead of the brazen speech plan, and b) failed to recognize that the delivered content was changed to soothe the angry pitchfork-wielding mobs who objected to an effort to solicit support of young kids into an Obama corps.
