Taranto: Kooky responses to President Obama’s innocuous speech.
There’s no doubt that Tunku Varadarajan is right: The way some conservatives reacted when President Obama announced that he would address America’s schoolchildren was downright kooky. “As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,” Jim Greer, chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said in a statement last week—an odd way to characterize what was billed as a speech whose purpose, according to the Education Department, was to “challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning.”
The White House must’ve loved this. All they had to do was release the prepared text of the speech, and as long as it actually was a pep talk and not a political or ideological rallying cry, many of their opponents would be made to look like nuts. And indeed, the speech, which came out yesterday, is totally innocuous. Mission accomplished.