Can you say “over privileged, home-schooled, xenophobe” kids?

I have to say that my favorite thing when reading an opinion piece by anyone associated with the fundamentalist Christians (and the right wing in general), is the lack of relevant statistics and/or facts. Can’t find a pertinent fact to back up your bald-faced horseshit? Just make up a vague time/place/idea/person/fact completely without source and continue on your journey. The backbone, nay cornerstone, of most of these nincompoops is hyperbole. It’s practice, performed at an obscene level of loudness, just bulldozes your senses where I could honestly see someone getting duped by this nonsense, and especially if they are on the same wavelength as the author of the piece. It becomes harder and harder to digest reality when you only have the stomach for narrow minded hyperbole fantasy land tidbits.

Enter one Elijah Friedeman, from The Millennial Perspective (a fundamentalist hive mind resume available for Conservative Think Tank whoring and some vacation bible school pizza parties). He’s also about 17/18 years old, yet another of these right wing wunderkinds who somehow have the intellectual maturity to understand such concepts as indoctrination and other first world problems that face our nation. He’s also familial to the American Family Radio, so he didn’t have to work up to this point in his budding editorial career.

So I found it awesome ironic that he started his editorial “Can you say ‘indoctrination’ kids?” with this gem:

“Recently I crossed the threshold from fact-based reality into a bastion of Obama-loving denial.”

In this piece he goes to a public school, and to his horror discovers that the children are being forced to worship and exalt Obama. He doesn’t name the public school, mostly because he experienced it in a fever dream, and partially because it does not exist. If it had a name I’m sure it was Robert Kelly Elementary. The teachers are all wearing starched khaki uniforms, it’s less a school than a crudely constructed aircraft hanger. There are loudspeakers saying things that Mr. Friedeman supposedly found “emblazoned on a wall”.

He is struck by the fact that a sitting presidents picture is hung up at all. This is his first clue that something is amiss. Unlike Mr. Friedeman, I went to public school my entire childhood. The sitting president ALWAYS had a picture hung up somewhere in the school.. So if his logic is true, then I’ve somehow been indoctrinated by the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations to exalt them and….wait, that DOES explain a few things! This is why I cry out “It’s Supply side Economics!” and “Tear down this wall” in my sleep sometimes!

He blames the putting up of this “memorial” on a zealot…I mean teacher or school administration. His evidence is that all the accolades to the president are typed out and laminated. Okay, first of all, the typed out part? Have you seen a first graders hand writing Mr. Friedeman? I mean, had you gone to a real public school you’d see the evidence that it’s mostly fierce gibberish at best. You’d be surprised the gymnastics the shapes of letters go through via the hand of a 7 year old. Secondly, laminated? Do you realize how many items the public schools laminate? And as an aside…have you seen a first grader’s clothes after a typical school day? Colors like that don’t exist in the rainbow yet somehow reside as stains on children’s clothing. The lone bright side of his lamentations is the fact that if one of these glorious displays were erected for George W. Bush he’d be against it too. So I guess we can give him points for consistency.

Then he moves forward with the noticing of a display of student essays. To his dismay these aren’t about themes from American History or great American Inventors (I’m catching a theme here). Never mind that he’s at this public school in a vacuum and surely these mad scribblings have been here since AT LEAST January 2009. The topic of the essays are how the students could help the president better the nation. Mr. Friedeman is again devastated that a fifth grader, who we all know has great interest in our nations politic, did not say they would help the president by opposing his policies. Mr. Friedeman the most pressing problems that face our nations 10 year olds is: lack of toy in Kids Meal, the plague known by it’s street name Cooties, and the existence of Santa Claus.

Finally, he stumbles around the campus till he garners an opportunity to ask an imaginary fifth grader Tea Party demagoguery…er I mean American History questions. The child doesn’t know that America once belonged to another country, never heard of the Revolutionary War, and woe of all woes Lexington and Concord. He concludes that this is why the politics of youth are so damaged.

I’m sure Fifth graders are taught the early history of America. In fact a cursory search of Google, “Are Fifth Graders Taught American History”, displays a lesson plan for a fifth grade class. Did Mr. Friedeman check the parking lot of Robert Kelly Elementary to see if a short bus was parked outside? And again with this old-timey rhetoric of the youth movement somehow being a bane to society what with it’s passionate politicking!? Oh you can die for you country in illegitimate, disregarded wars; but heaven forbid you actually get passionate about your politics and vote for a black man.

Mr. Friedeman could’ve used this incendiary expose of our public schools as a stepping stone to why our school kids are so uneducated. This is the fact that betrays his age and lack of skill as a shim sham salesman. He could’ve assailed the under funded school districts, that underpay their teachers. The over stuffed classrooms that allow the struggling children to fall through the cracks unnoticed. I guess they don’t really cover causality in Friedeman household.

Mr. Friedeman, from what little information I’ve gathered on the internets (I learned it from watching you Mr. Friedeman), was home schooled. He has been indoctrinated to sell shim sham from his family’s general store. He practices the age old art of fear baiting, narrow minded fundamentalism that has propelled some of the worst morality battles in recent times.

To top this off I have to say what the hell do you know Mr. Friedeman? Have you even started college yet? Of course you’ll be going, I’m sure all your tuition and whatnot is already secured and even graduate school, if you’re so inclined as to not just go ahead and run the shim sham radio empire of backwards leaning evangelical couching antagonism known as your brand of Christianity. I assume you will, during your college years, assail the very education system you are benefiting from with it’s Socialist indoctrinating Professors and the myriad of women that would be better off standing next to a kitchen counter making your dinner, instead of educating themselves.