"This beatification is different because this pope is different."

"He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history... The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history... In a certain sense, for many Catholics he’s already a saint, even without beatification and, let’s be honest, even without a miracle."

ADDED: Longer video here.

Indoctrinating children.

I'm working on editing some video I took at the Capitol today, showing the political indoctrination of children. It pains me to see children taught to intone or chant things that should be understood first. When you think of things like that, what comes to mind? Maybe you think of the schoolkids taught to sing "Mmm mmm mmm/Barack Hussein Obama." Maybe you think about making kids say the Pledge of Allegiance, about which Justice Frankfurter wrote:

The wisdom of training children in patriotic impulses by those compulsions which necessarily pervade so much of the educational process is not for our independent judgment. Even were we convinced of the folly of such a measure, such belief would be no proof of its unconstitutionality. For ourselves, we might be tempted to say that the deepest patriotism is best engendered by giving unfettered scope to the most crochety beliefs.... But the courtroom is not the arena for debating issues of educational policy. It is not our province to choose among competing considerations in the subtle process of securing effective loyalty to the traditional ideals of democracy, while respecting at the same time individual idiosyncracies among a people so diversified in racial origins and religious allegiances. So to hold would, in effect, make us the school board for the country. That authority has not been given to this Court, nor should we assume it....

(Details on that case, Gobitis, here.)

I'll have my video up in a separate post soon.

UPDATE: Here.

IN THE COMMENTS: What Irene thinks of is "The old country."

Scott Walker likened to Stalin... and to the Wicked Witch of the West.

Some analogies are more heavy-handed than others:


(Enlarge.)

I talked to the man who combined "SS" and Stalin in his denouncement of Walker:



And to the young woman with the "Release the Flying Monkeys" sign:



(The photo and videos were done at about 11:40 this morning, at the Wisconsin State Capitol.)

"[O]nly the color of [Michelle Obama's] dress paid direct homage to China..."

"... red symbolizes good luck and happiness."

And Communism.

Oh, no! Fluoride in the water!

The government finally acknowledges the harm it has done — vindicating all those nuts who've been freaking out about it since the 50s....

You know that's the way your hard core commie works:

Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water? Well, do you know what it is?...  Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?... Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream?... You know when fluoridation first began?...  Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice.

Watch Christine O'Donnell dominate debate, even as Wolf Blitzer tries to control her.

She is not susceptible to pushback by people who imagine themselves her superiors. Extremely well done.

More on the debate here.

ADDED: I think this clip — I haven't watched the rest of the debate — will resonate with women. A lot of us have had experiences with men trying to control us like this, and we instinctively root for the woman in this situation. I was reminded of the famous Hillary Clinton-Rick Lazio debate, in which the male, Lazio, invaded the zone of personal privacy of the female, Clinton.

AND: You can really feel the disrespect for O'Donnell in that clip. Whether it's because she's a woman or not, I think it stirs something instinctive in many women. It's dangerous for men even to seem to give off the vibe that they're really saying: You don't really belong here, little lady. Hillary has often tried to get us to feel that vibe, and it's worked for her quite few times.

"Kim Jong Il, the supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, deeply concerned over the soldiers’ diet."

The title of a painting from an exhibit called "“Flowers for Kim Il Sung: Art and Architecture from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.... in Vienna.

By presenting it uncritically, the Vienna museum is subtly legitimizing the world’s cruelest regime....

Like most socialist realism, this “art” is devoid of complexity. Whatever talents the North Korean painters may possess are tragically subordinated to Stalinist politics and stultifying adulation of the Dear Leader. The descriptions of the artwork underline its utterly bland, primitive, and unenlightening character: “The leaders’ closeness to the people is repeatedly emphasized,” reads the press release. “Red, internationally recognized as being symbolic of socialism, is employed most frequently.” My tour guide’s attempt to distinguish the works from those produced in other Communist societies by labeling it “Idealistic Realism” only underscored the lengths to which the MAK has had to go in order to justify the exhibition....


Could one imagine, in the 1930s, an English gallery featuring Nazi art in such undiscerning fashion?...

What about a Viennese gallery? You'd think Austria would be more sensitive.... about its own reputation.

The article, by James Kirchick, ends with this great George Orwell quote: "All art is propaganda. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art." (By the way, Orwell is calling himself a propagandist there, is he not?)

If you're going to criticize the new social studies curriculum adopted by the Texas Board of Education, you'd better quote it.

Or at least link to the text. And if you choose to paraphrase and not even link, and I have to look up the text myself, and your paraphrase is not accurate, it is my job to embarrass you by pointing that out.

Let me embarrass the Washington Post. Below, the material from the WaPo article, written by Michael Birnbaum, is indented. After the indented part, I've located the relevant quote from the Board of Education text, found here. (I'm searching 3 PDF documents: Economics with Emphasis on the Free Enterprise System and Its Benefits Subchapter A. High School; Social Studies Subchapter B. Middle School; Social Studies Subchapter C. High School.)

The Washington Post writes:

The Texas state school board gave final approval Friday to controversial social studies standards....

The new standards say that the McCarthyism of the 1950s was later vindicated -- something most historians deny --...

The students are required to "describe how McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the arms race, and the space race increased Cold War tensions and how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government..." The word "vindicated" is inflammatory and unfair. What is the Washington Post saying historians deny? One can be informed of the reality of what the Venona Papers revealed about communist infiltration into the U.S. government and still understand and deplore the excesses of "McCarthyism."

...draw an equivalency between Jefferson Davis's and Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses...

Students are required to "analyze the ideas contained in Jefferson Davis' inaugural address and Abraham Lincoln's ideas about liberty, equality, union, and government as contained in his first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address." The word "equivalency" is uncalled for. The requirement is to analyze, not to be indoctrinated that the ideas are the same.

... say that international institutions such as the United Nations imperil American sovereignty...

What I'm seeing is "explain the significance of the League of Nations and the United Nations" and "analyze the human and physical factors that influence the power to control territory, create conflict/war, and impact international political relations such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), or the control of resources." Where is the language that can be paraphrased "imperil American sovereignty"?

.... and include a long list of Confederate officials about whom students must learn.

Students are required to "explain the roles played by significant individuals and heroes during the Civil War, including Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and congressional Medal of Honor recipients William Carney and Philip Bazaar." Only Davis and Lee were Confederate officials! There is also this: "describe the role of individuals such as governors George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Maddox and groups, including the Congressional bloc of southern Democrats, that sought to maintain the status quo [in the Civil Rights Era]." That's obviously not from the Civil War, but I can see why it's annoying to Democrats.

They also removed references to capitalism and replaced them with the term "free-enterprise system."

The document on economics does use the term "free enterprise system" throughout, but students are required to "understand that the terms free enterprise, free market, and capitalism are synonymous terms to describe the U.S. economic system," so what is the problem?

Virtually everything cited in the article to make the curriculum seem controversial is misstated! Appalling!

ADDED: Birnbaum had an article in the previous day's Washington Post that does contain quotes, and these have to do with changes that went through on Thursday (and which do not — but should! — appear in the documents that are available at the Board of Education website):

Students will now study "efforts by global organizations to undermine U.S. sovereignty," an addition late Thursday evening encouraged by board member Don McLeroy (R), who has put forward many of the most contentious changes....

Another one of the seven conservative board members, David Bradley (R), added a list of Confederate generals and officials to the list of topics that students must study. ...

This provides support for Birnbaum's statement that the standards "include a long list of Confederate officials about whom students must learn." And it answers my question "Where is the language that can be paraphrased 'imperil American sovereignty'?" My criticisms about "vindicating" McCarthyism, "the equivalency between Jefferson Davis's and Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses," and the term "free-enterprise system" remain.

I have not been defending the Texas standards, only attacking the quality of the journalism that fails to quote or link to a text that is referred to. Birnbaum's Friday article contains some useful quotes (though still not a link to the whole text). The Saturday article was unanchored to text and forced me to look for what I could find on line. I'm also criticizing inaccurate paraphrasing, like the use of the words "vindicating" and "equivalency." Birnbaum's take on the standards might be true, but in an article that refers to a text, I do need to see the text. Paraphrasing, without the text, raises suspicions, and I don't apologize for having those suspicions.

ALSO: I'm critical of the Board of Education for not posting all the relevant text on its website. And — as should be obvious — I'm not endorsing the standards themselves. The complexity and detail alone tends to show that the Board did not have the best interests of children at the center of their project. And it didn't seem to care much about the capacity of teachers. The material on law, for example, would be difficult for a law professor to teach to law students.

"Still I am a Marxist..."

... says the Dalai Lama, conceding that capitalism has done China some good: "Millions of people's living standards improved." Marxism remains dear to him because it has "moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits." Only. Only improving the lives of millions.

(Also posted at Instapundit.)

***

The Dalai Lama also cited the election of Barack Obama as a sign that "human beings being more mature."

"Now I hasten to say that the controversy at Harvard is only a pale echo of Soviet Communism."

Writes Eugene Volokh (who knows how it felt to live in the Soviet Union):

With luck, this student won’t have her career ruined, or even much affected. I’ve seen a public call for her to be expelled.... but I doubt that this will happen. And even if some of the best future jobs are closed off to her, at least for a while, a Harvard Law diploma will get you to plenty of places. She doesn’t have to worry, I suspect, about not being able to feed herself or her future family.

Yet the public revelation of a private conversation; the public condemnation by management; the obvious danger of serious career ramifications; the apology, which I take it came out of a fear of those ramifications — all for daring to say to friends something that simply represents a basic scientific principle (the need to be open to the possibility that there are racial differences in intelligence, as one is open to other possibilities on other scientific questions) — that just sounded a little too familiar to me.

It’s a pale echo, but of something so bad that we should be wary even of pale echoes.

Isn't this a teaching moment for Harvard Law School? Dean Minow's memo dated April 29th said:

A troubling event and its reverberations can offer an opportunity to increase awareness, and to foster dialogue and understanding. The BLSA leadership brought this view to our meeting yesterday, and I share their wish to turn this moment into one that helps us make progress in a community dedicated to fairness and justice.

So the original "troubling event" was something Minow chose to use as a teaching moment to increase awareness, and to foster dialogue and understanding. She embraced the practice of turning the difficult material into an occasion to make progress in a community dedicated to fairness and justice.

Keep teaching, professor! A lot of us are prepped and eager for Lesson 2!

Silly WaPo headline: "Obama and Democrats appeal to new voters in midterms."

By "appeal," of course, they don't mean that voters find them appealing. I know that without reading the article. Is anyone clueless enough to think otherwise?

First paragraph:

President Obama is declaring his stake in the November midterm elections, as his Democratic Party prepares to announce an ambitious strategy to appeal to independent voters in its quest to maintain control of Congress.

Declare! Ambitious! Strategy! Appeal! Independent! Quest! Control!

Could you please settle down and become a newspaper?

Obama plans to issue a call-to-action video message to his supporters on Monday. Democratic officials called the video the first in a series of personal efforts designed to rekindle the grass-roots momentum that propelled Obama to the presidency -- this time, in a way that will benefit his party's congressional and gubernatorial candidates.

Let me try to understand. The Washington Post, which aspires to prestige in journalism, is front-paging the news that the President of the United States is going to release a campaign video and that he wants his party to win in the November elections? And it presents this non-news in cheesy PR language? Do the editors have no shame?

And what the hell does "designed to rekindle the grass-roots momentum" even mean? A presidential video is the opposite of grass roots.

Also, it's a mixed metaphor. Kindle... grass. Are we growing grass or burning things? Or did you mean to make me think of a prairie fire? Remember "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism" (1974) by Bill Ayers, et al.? ("We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.")

That's not the image WaPo wanted, I'm sure. "The name came from a quote by Mao Zedong, 'a single spark can set a prairie fire.'"

Ambitious! Strategy! Quest! Control!

"'Hu's the Communist?' I thought he was asking a question."

A joke about a photograph of Obama and the president of China. More jokes told by Sarah Palin here.

(And can someone tell Politico it's Hu Jintao, not Hu Jinato.)

"Tear down this wall."

"To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall..."

"... consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other. Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system."

"In a victory for Republicans and the Obama administration’s conservative critics, Van Jones resigned..."

"... as the White House’s environmental jobs 'czar' on Saturday."

That's the first paragraph of the NYT story on the Van Jones resignation — which is also its first story about Jones. The site's "Caucus" blog did take notice of the controversy — and the issue of the NYT's failure to write about it — yesterday:

Keeping up with Jones: Republicans are accusing one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers of being a communist and calling for his resignation....

Mr. Jones was caught on tape using an unprintable word to describe Republicans and allowed his name to be put on a letter requesting an investigation of whether the Bush administration allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to happen as a pretext for war....

Conservatives are abuzz over the mainstream media’s oversight of the story. According to the Washington Examiner, as of 11:30 a.m. Friday, none of the major news outlets, including The Times, had mentioned the controversy.

Whether the Bush administration allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to happen as a pretext for war? The petition — read it — "calls for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war." (Boldface added.)

The Caucus toned down what the petition said and did not link to it. There's a big difference between "allowed" — which might mean only the administration was not sufficiently vigilant — and "deliberately allowed" — which accuses the administration of knowing and letting it happen. The petition is asserting that there is reason to think the Bush administration wanted the attacks to occur so it could lead us into war. The innocuous paraphrase in the Caucus prevents us from feeling outraged at the document Jones "allowed his name to be put on." There's that word "allowed" again! How passive and unknowing was he? He signed it! Let's speak English and quit pussyfooting. The Caucus wanted to frame this as a story of bad old Republicans causing trouble.

Now, back to today's article on the resignation:

Controversy over Mr. Jones’s past comments and affiliations has slowly escalated over several weeks, erupting on Friday with calls for his resignation.

Appointed as a special adviser for “green jobs” by President Obama, Mr. Jones did not go through the traditional vetting process for administration officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. So it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones’s past actions received broad airing, including his derogatory statements about Republicans in February and his signature on a 2004 letter suggesting that former President George W. Bush might have knowingly allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to occur in order to use them as a “pre-text to war.”

Not just knowingly, but deliberately. Please quote to the petition. And link to it.

Mr. Jones’s involvement in the 1990s with a group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement prompted recent accusations by conservative critics that he associated with Communists. The group, according to a post-mortem written by some of its founders, was an anti-capitalist, antiwar organization committed to achieving “solidarity among all oppressed peoples” with “direct militant action.”

Republican blogs and conservative talk show hosts, notably Glenn Beck of Fox News Channel, seized upon Mr. Jones’s statements and associations.

"Involvement," "statements," "associations" — what did Jones do exactly? The NYT should serve its readers by putting us in a position to think about the trustworthiness of the Obama administration and its selection of "czars." This isn't just another occasion to note that "Republican blogs" and "conservative talk show hosts" attack the administration. It's interesting that the opposition won a "victory," but more important than the endless partisan battles is the question whether we can trust the administration.

Mr. Jones apologized on Wednesday...

“I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past,” Mr. Jones said in a statement announcing his resignation that was released early Sunday morning....

Does that mean the NYT will not go into the matter of what Jones did and said and what the Obama administration knew about it? He's gone now. Go back to looking away, like good little Obamites.

"[T]he number of people who believe that the President has larded the government with communists (!) was astonishing."

Says Joe Klein, who attended a town hall meeting in Nebraska:

One woman said there were four known communists in the government and that she'd researched it on the internet. When I asked her afterwards, she said environmental adviser Van Jones, legal advisor Cass Sunstein (who was last spotted being excoriated by the left for supporting the FISA revisions), someone named Lloyd and she didn't remember the fourth. And wasn't it suspicious that Obama had all these czars working for him--that was a Russkie commie term, wasn't it? When I asked, the woman admitted that, among other things, she occasionally listened to William Bennett's conservative radio show. I pointed out that Bennett had once been the Drug Czar, appointed by Ronald Reagan. Life sure can be complicated sometimes.

Wow. Joe got a lot out of one woman in Nebraska! But remember, what he asserts is "astonishing" is "the number" of people who think there are communists in the government. I certainly agree that the number one is astonishing. You'd think, by now, a lot more would be plunging ahead and using the inflammatory word.

I was later told by a local observer that many of these vomitous, disgraceful notions were the fruit of Glenn Beck's fruitful imagination. "We are living Glenn Beck's fantasy life," said this audience member. The amazing thing remains not only the unwillingness of responsible Republicans--a term that is in danger of becoming an oxymoron--to call bull-- on this, but also the willingness of many prominent Republicans to join in the slinging of garbage.

Astonishing... amazing... poor Joe is continually surprised by ordinary things. What's amazing? Blech... I have to reread: not only the unwillingness of responsible Republicans... to call bullshit on this, but also the willingness of many prominent Republicans to join in the slinging of garbage. So what's amazing — to plow through Klein's verbiage — is that Republicans use and put up with inflammatory rhetoric.

Yawn. I don't really think Klein is astonished and amazed by any of this. He's just doing the old I'm-surprised-at-you routine beloved of kindergarten teachers. I'm sure he'd love conservatives to stop putting their arguments in such stimulating and colorful terms. (Look out! It's a death panel!)

Michelle Cottle reports that there are Republican-sanctioned efforts afoot to have parents not send their children to school on September 8 because the President is scheduled to address the nation's school-children that day and they are afraid that he will fill their little heads with socialist propaganda. That is somewhere well beyond disgraceful.

No, Joe. Because they are disgusted at the melding of partisan political power and education and the prospect of a child made to accept compulsory school in the form of gazing upon the face of our leader. Imagine if Bush had proposed such an exercise for all of the children on the first day of school. Well, Bush would never have proposed such a thing because: 1. He didn't have the fawning approval of the vast majority of teachers, and 2. He never acquired the idea that his countenance and voice could inspire the masses. But if he did you know very well, Joe, that you'd have been disgusted at Bush, not the people who objected to his absurd display.

Could I just say that the intensity of this getting pretty scary...and dangerous?

Could I just say... may I be so bold... timid little me... can I please just say something... I'm scared! It's dangerous!!!1!!111!

We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working.

Get a grip, Joe, you timorous mouse of a man. But that's just a joke. I know you're not really concerned about "civil discourse" in the abstract. You're annoyed that the people have started paying attention and are not sitting back in awed reverence like the most confused and cowed first grader watching that nice man on TV. You thought that when the Democrats won — "I won!" — they'd be able to roll up their preferences into 1000-page bundles and there wouldn't be anything people could do about it. But — lo and behold! — they used speech, free speech, they spoke their minds, sometimes harshly and with hot emotion, but they got themselves heard. If you think that is "heading toward a cliff" without "the usual brakes," then I say you don't believe in a free democratic society.

Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal--rushing us toward a tragedy far greater than the California health care forum finger-biting Karen describes below.

What tragedy? Not passing a sprawling, amorphous, unproven rearrangement of the way health care is paid for? Who is plying overheated, irrational rhetoric? That lady in Nebraska? Glenn Beck? Or Joe Klein?

"The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang."

"Reaching from the grave, Zhao pillories a conservative wing of the [Chinese Communist Party] for missteps that led to the bloody crackdown, which began after dark on June 3, 1989 and left hundreds dead. Few in China's leadership at the time escape Zhao's criticism. He castigates Deng Xiaoping, the man credited with opening China to the West and launching its economic reforms; Li Peng, the dour premier at the time of the Tiananmen tragedy; Deng Liqun, a hardline party theoretician; Li Xiannian, a former vice president; and even Hu Yaobang, Zhao's longtime ally, whose death on April 15, 1989 touched off the student-led protests."

"Good morning. I forget whether I'm supposed to wish you a 'Happy Earth Day' or a 'Happy Lenin's Birthday.' Oh, wait. It's both."

A Corner classic.

"Vietnam has suspended a much-criticised plan to ban very short, thin and flat-chested people from driving."

"The proposal worried many in this nation of slender people and [spurred] jokes about traffic police with tape measures enthusiastically flagging down female motorcyclists, and predictions of a run on padded bras."

So! Mockery works, even on communists.

"As creepy and inappropriate as this singing is -- it’s not as bad as what Obama is actually proposing..."

Jim Lindgren tries to figure out what to think about that ludicrous, appalling video of children singing to the glory of Obama.



I'd like to say something about it too, but I can't force myself through even the first minute. I gag on treacle. But some people seem to think we should be deeply disturbed by this video. Lindgren links to Roger Simon, who says:

Watching this video has disturbed me more than almost anything I have seen in recent years. It is the kind of exploitation of children that reminds me of Young Pioneer Camps I saw when visiting the Soviet Union in the Eighties. You could say, as some have, that this is much like what happens with children in churches and synagogues across America, but this is about a political figure — one of two current presidential candidates and the one leading in the polls.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh was saying:

Basically the lyrics were, "Yes, we can, lift each other up in peace and love and hope. Change. Change!" You know, I watched the video. I did not see any Little Red Book with Obama quotations in there, the, "Yes, We Can Manual." You're talking about Chairman Mao, right? I did not see any of that. "Yes, we can. Nations all joined as one! Sing for joy. Sing for peace. Courage, justice, hope, peace, love, hope, change, change!" Kids 5 to 12. Little crumb-crunchers, skulls full of mush being polluted and perverted by a bunch of Hollywood pro-Obamaite liberals.

Rush wasn't buying too deeply into the notion that it looks like communism. (And he's always on the lookout for communism.) He was going on about the Hollywood liberals who poured resources into making a video that was supposed to look like a charming small-town community effort.

My main impression -- and, again, I can't bear to watch the whole thing -- is that soft-hearted liberals love to think of Obama as the embodiment of the ideal of racial harmony, and then, in that vein, it seems appropriate for children to sing a hymn to racial harmony. It's much the same idea as the old "Yes We Can" video. The error lies not in the worship of a man, but in the facile belief that a mere man can embody an ideal.