Educating Young Liberals
A Washington, D.C., public school, apparently in an effort to shape students like the majority of residents in the District of Columbia, recently assigned sixth-graders a homework assignment that required students to compare former President George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler.
The assignment, given out at McKinley Tech Middle School, asked them to draw examples from two assigned reading texts and fill in a Venn diagram with similarities and differences between the two. "Now that we have read about two men of power who abused their power in various ways, we will compare and contrast them and their actions. Please refer to your texts, 'Fighting Hitler -- A Holocaust Story' and 'Bush: Iraq War Justified Despite No WMD' to compare and contrast former President George W. Bush and Hitler," the assignment read.
An unnamed outraged parent called the school office to complain and was told the assignment was part of an approved curriculum unit. However, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Public Schools said while the readings had been suggested, the texts were not meant to be compared in the manner assigned. "The teacher deeply regrets this mistake, and any suggestion to malign the presidency or make any comparison in this egregious way," she said, adding that the school would send home letters informing parents and that the teacher, who admitted she showed "extremely poor judgment," would apologize to students.
Hypocritical Harry
Good ol' Harry Reid. He just can't help himself.
Confronted with his hypocrisy over saying he deserved an apology when U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La., recently said he ran the Senate like a "plantation" but dismissing Hillary Clinton's nearly identical statement about Republicans running the Senate "like a plantation -- and you know what I'm talking about" in 2006, the Senate majority leader simply changed the subject.
"I didn't listen to [Clinton's] speech," said Reid, who was then the Senate minority leader, according to the New York Post, "but no one can question her civil- and human-rights credentials. They're the best."
Bush ... Blech, Blech
Don't try to confuse House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi with the facts, and don't mention President Obama's predecessor to her. Asked last week about a statement in which a former Bush administration lawyer said Obama had adopted the same view of war powers as the Bush administration, Pelosi bristled and denied there were similarities.
"How [the Bush administration] interpreted [the War Powers Act] and for how long is another issue," she said. "But he's not relevant right now. What we're talking about right now is ISIS is a threat. We have to work together to destroy them, and that is the subject at hand. I didn't approve of anything [Bush] said or did when he was in office, much less care about his opinion right now."
Fantasy Island
Coming to the Discovery Channel in late October: A Republican and a Democratic U.S. senator dropped on the deserted island of Eru in the Marshall Islands and forced to "work together as they attempt to spear fish, build shelter and find enough water to survive for one week," according to Entertainment Weekly.
It's either the nuttiest idea to come out of Washington, D.C., or the way they should settle all the problems that plague Congress. And, supposedly, the senators approached Discovery about the project rather than vice versa.
Neither Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., or Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., are up for election this fall.
Their joint statement about the venture, although a lot contrived, has a little nugget of truth at the end: "Both of us know just how frustrated people are with Washington right now. We can both attest that no one is more frustrated than those of us trying to get things done in this environment. We recognize how difficult it can be to cut through the partisanship. So we decided to do something completely out of the ordinary and frankly a little extreme to show the world and our colleagues that even if you have serious differences, if you want to survive you have to work together."