Wow. I read a
diary yesterday about an author's speech at the International Reading Association Conference in Chicago was cancelled because of her views on NCLB.
I was going to send this along to my conservative baptist mother-in-law, and ask what she thought about it. NCLB is like the one issue where she has problems with Bush, so I thought it would make an opening to a nice discussion.
But I just . . . couldn't . . . stop . . .
Read the train-wreck of a rant below.
Mom,
The premier speaker (an award winning children's book author) scheduled for the International Reading Association Conference in Chicago was cancelled because McGraw-Hill (the writers of all the standardized tests, as well as the major sponsors of the event) didn't like what she was going to say about No Child Left Behind. Are sponsors supposed to be able to censor like that?
Your thoughts?
Ah well, that legislation was probably written by corporations like McGraw-Hill and Niel Bush's education software company to enable them to suck money out of the public funds (like our current energy policy). Ah, the invisible (bribing, legislation-writing) hand of the free market.
You're aware Bush and his crew pretty much falsified the results of the version of NCLB they had going in Texas to make it look good for country-wide consumption, right? They just falsified data, didn't count the test scores of the schools and students who underperformed, and lowered the actual standards so they could say it was working and more students were passing? There wasn't any improvement in college acceptance rates, and "On the 2000 exit-level mathematics test (tenth grade), students [in Texas] could get fewer than half the questions right and still pass."
Ah well. Put in a spoiled, cowardly, drunken frat boy (three documented DUIs we know of) who's been bailed out of every failed business venture he's tried by daddy (and daddy's arab oilmen contacts) and won his place at the front of the line by slandering opponents (McCain's black baby, anyone?), you get what you vote for. An illegal war to show up daddy, an out-loud actual vocal assertion of authority to break any law he wants because he says can and "he's only doing it to make us safe" (like the guy who only hits his wife because he loves her), and a massive spying program tracking all the domestic phone calls of all the customers of AT&T, Bell South, and Verizon. That one get you? News about it broke just last night.
Yes, I'm an angry liberal, and the more I write here, the angrier I get. I just don't get why you're not angry, too. Every American citizen should be, because what bush has done in his time in office has been against everything the founding fathers wanted, and everything we've been taught about how our government is supposed to work. Of the developed countries of the world only Latvia (yes, that's considered a developed nation) has a higher infant mortality rate than we do. We're ranked lower than Cuba on that score. And you're not angry? Your mother's healthcare is a ripoff that allows the insurance companies to change her coverage on a whim, but she can only change her coverage once a year, and you're not angry?
The fact that bush ignored a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," kicked out Clinton's anti-terrorism guy, told his own guys not to talk to him about this Al Quaeda nonsense, and spent literally 42% of his time on vacation in the months before 9/11, and, after being told that morning that we were under attack spent 7 or 8 more minutes sitting still in shock is a testament to how incredibly incompetent he is, and I've been angry ever since.
To quote an article I read recently:
Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.
Liberal Media my ass.
Ugh. I started this letter just wanting to ask you about your thoughts on that first link, but I couldn't stop writing. I love you, Mom, and I'm sorry I let this anger at outside forces I have no control over into my relationship with you, but it's hard. It's hard to look at your granddaughter and know how long lasting the consequences of this fool's presidency will last. We've got a new generation of terrorists looking to cause us harm because of Iraq, incidents of terrorism have skyrocketed since we went there, communist China owns our skyrocketing debt (which the republicans have had to raise the allowable limit on twice now), and so on. For a few short months after 9/11, we had the good will of the world at our backs. We don't have that anymore. I doubt we will ever again, and it makes me far more sad than I am angry.