School Speeches Past and Present

Huffpo was in a huff over the barbaric Texans’ response to Obama’s speech to school children, but Byron York provided some useful historical context. You see, Bush gave a similar speech, resulting in rather a different flavor of virtuous indignation. To wit:

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president’s school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’”

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush’s appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech. “The hearing this morning is to really examine the expenditure of $26,750 of the Department of Education funds to produce and televise an appearance by President Bush at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, DC,” Ford began. “As the chairman of the committee charged with the authorization and implementation of education programs, I am very much interested in the justification, rationale for giving the White House scarce education funds to produce a media event.”

Unfortunately for Ford, the General Accounting Office concluded that the Bush administration had not acted improperly. “The speech itself and the use of the department’s funds to support it, including the cost of the production contract, appear to be legal,” the GAO wrote in a letter to Chairman Ford. “The speech also does not appear to have violated the restrictions on the use of appropriations for publicity and propaganda.”

That didn’t stop Democratic allies from taking their own shots at Bush. The National Education Association denounced the speech, saying it “cannot endorse a president who spends $26,000 of taxpayers’ money on a staged media event at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C. — while cutting school lunch funds for our neediest youngsters.”

Thanks, Byron. History is always a useful guide in deciding when virtuous indignation is or is not appropriate.

The Christian Right Circa 1839

The Christian right is fond of associating itself with our Founding Fathers. In fact, had they lived at the time, they would have found themselves in the very opposite camp. That camp had a name that should be familiar to every American schoolchild: Tories.

Then, as now, they had a penchant for considering themselves just a little more “equal” than their fellow citizens. Then, as now, they also had a penchant for stuffing their religion down other people’s throats. They were a lot better at it then, though, because they had a lot more power. They continued to have that power for many years after our Revolution. The following excerpt from the London “Quarterly Review,” organ of the Tories in 1839, will give you an idea of the consideration they showed their fellow citizens when they had the upper hand. Referring to the perceived immorality of the lower classes in Austria at the time, it draws some “lessons” for English society:

In such a state of things, who can deny the absolute necessity for religious education? Teach the lower orders in England to read and write, and unless they are very narrowly watched, the first use they will make of their accomplishments will be to spell over the pages of a newspaper. Talk to them of the value of intellectual acquirements, and the odds are that you will only make them discontented with the lot in which Providence has placed them, and prone to listen to the first itinerant demagogue who may think fit to rail against the unequal distribution of wealth or the recognised distinctions of society. It has been said that they will learn it time to understand the advantages of these distinctions, and perceive that the welfare of the community, themselves inclusive, is bound up with the institution of property; but our firm conviction is, that the time they are able to set apart for reading is utterly inadequate to such a result, and that, whilst man is man, those who earn their bread by the sweat of ther brow must be content to take political conclusions upon trust. In the case of monarchy, for example, you may always teach them to shake off the prejudice, you will never teach them the value of the principle. It were well, therefore, if such topics of inquiry cound be altogether excluded, but they cannot: all we can do is to make moral training go hand in hand with intellectual cultivation, and give the general superintendence to the body most interested in the preservation of order and best qualified to instil a proper sense of religious duty – the Church.

Thus the genuine intellectual forebears of today’s political Christians. They were defanged in America by men like Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Paine, men who had nothing in common with them intellectually. Fortunately, they were eventually defanged in England as well. May they always remain so. It will be better for all of us, including them.

Wild West Conditions in Germany

In German, that would be “Wild West Züstände.” Translation of the opening graph:

What began as a peaceful protest ended in a riot. Leftist demonstrators threw stones and bottles during protests against a march by the NPD (neo-Nazis). Police officials felt they had been “massively attacked.” The police fired one or two warning shots.

Of course, the level of mayhem wasn’t in the same league with our town hall meetings here in the US, but things do seem to be heating up over there.