Rush keeps saying: either they’re subversive or stupid...

The Open Press ^ | Jan. 8, 2010 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Only two choices about the Liberals in power: they’re deliberately undermining the country or they are too dumb to figure out the right things to do.

My impression is that Rush just swerved into this harsh either/or menu within the last month. Traitors or fools! Communists or dopes! Subversives or exceedingly clumsy!

When you first hear the two poles of the dilemma, you might react, oh, that’s awfully drastic, isn’t it? Surely there are some other choices. And your mind sorts urgently through all the possibilities you can think of...

I’ve been fascinated by Rush’s logic because I went through much the same permutations trying to explain education in the USA. Rush took a month, whereas my evolution took about four years, but we ended up in the same spot. There are just two choices!

When you look at our public schools, you see so many stupid policies, so many dumb ideas, so many counterproductive strategies, that you finally throw up your hands and say either these people are trying to destroy the country, or these people are too mentally defective to be let out of the house.

Let me assure you, every person I talk to has exactly the same reaction: oh, that’s awfully drastic, isn’t it? I talk to doctors, lawyers, business people, and they just can’t get their minds around the idea that our elite educators might be actually trying to hurt the country or, on the other hand, that these educators are just dimwits with Ph.D.’s next to their names.

I write this post now because I’m assuming many of you have heard Rush explain his perspective. So now maybe you’ll be comfortable applying the same logic to education. A lot of crazy things start to make sense once you do this.

Many of my articles on Improve-Education.org develop this idea.

The link is to a short press release that is built around the idea. Here’s how that goes (excerpt from this point):

(OPENPRESS) January 8, 2010 -- The big question, when discussing American public education throughout the 20th century, is this: was there a conspiracy? A bold new article says YES.

“Many people shy away from the word conspiracy,” says education writer Bruce Price. “It’s a loaded word. People don’t want to think of the Education Establishment as a criminal enterprise.”

However, Price warns, there’s a problem. The relentless mediocrity, the compulsion toward dumbing down, the apparent inability to create world-class schools--all these things cry out for an explanation. Can we say, well, all that was just an accident, it was bad luck, it was a long-running streak of incompetence, decade after decade?

“Do these explanations satisfy you,” Price asks. “If so, fine. Let’s call it The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight defense. Personally, I could accept it if we were talking about only five or ten years. But the blueprint of American public education is almost the same for nearly a hundred years. It doesn’t matter in which direction you look -- reading, math, sciences, history, foreign languages-- you are confronted by a weird indifference to academic success. Kids graduate from high school barely able to read and with very little knowledge of the world. The business communty can’t find skilled workers; our economic vitality is threatened. There’s a lot of failure to explain away. I started to look at the history of education, which is much more complex and surprising than most people would ever imagine. A few years later, I decided that the word conspiracy was completely appropriate. My conclusions are presented in ‘41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt.’”

The historical record is clear, Price points out. John Dewey and his successors were socialists. They believed that America would become a socialist country; and that it was their duty to prepare this country for socialism. Now, at that point, you don’t have anything criminal. They could have tried to persuade the public that they had the best ideas.

“The problem,” Price says, “is that Dewey and his colleagues decided to proceed in secret and without any governmental sanction. There was no public discussion, and no vote. Dewey and his colleagues took over the teachers colleges so they could indoctrinate the teachers. Their long-range goal was to transform the country. The immediate goal was to create more cooperative, less competitive children. Academic achievement was devalued. The wishes of parents were ignored. Those are the crimes.”

What you had, according to Price, was a tiny clique which succeeded in staging a coup, at least in one major sector of the culture. The people at the top of American education were willing to sacrifice traditional educational concerns in order to maximize social engineering. “You might object,” Price notes, “that they didn’t succeed in creating a socialist country. But isn’t that still open? In any event, facing the truth is essential. If we want to improve American education, we first have to acknowledge why it’s not as good as it could be.”

“41: Educators O. J. Simpson, and Guilt” is just one of several profound new articles on Improve-Education.org, which has emerged as a leading voice for education reform. "38: Saving Public Schools" offers a radical critique of the public schools. “40: Sight Words--The Big Stupid” explains why so many students don’t learn to read. “45: The Crusade Against Knowledge” explains why American schools don’t emphasize content. The site was founded in 2005.

Bruce Price, the founder of Improve-Education.org, is the author of “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happpened To American Education.”

[Red Badger]

They are both.............

[lexington minuteman 1775]

Well I am not much into conspiracy theories. But I do believe somebody picked Obama because he was a likeable guy who READS well and would be an excellent front man for their plans. I have no idea who the person or persons are behind him. But like this blog implies it seems too much to be a coincidence. I think the likes of Willam Ayers in the background tend more to PROVE this sort of conspiracy theory than to DISPROVE IT. IMHO that is!
Freegards,
Lex

[Parley Baer]

I agree. My vote is for both.

[Elle Bee]

Rush keeps saying: either they’re subversive or stupid...

I agree with him - they're subversive (at best) no one could be this stupid

.

[Valpal1]

Yep, it’s a mix of 10% subversives and 90% useful idiots. Similar mix to be found in the environmental movement.

[hampdenkid]

I’d opt for subversive and evil. I am in a city called La Ceiba, Honduras, right now. And it is a case study in why I say subversive and evil.

For seven decades, La Ceiba was essentially built by the STandard Fruit Company. They built the hospital. They built the high school. They built the church. They built breath breath-takingly beautiful parks. They gave the land for the stadium and municipal buildings. And, of course, they provided jobs to thousands of workers at pay rates far higher than they could have secured elsewhere.

But, the liberals in America hated Standard Fruit Company. You see, Standard Fruit “exploited the poor Honduran workers.” So, the subversive, evil liberals beat and beat and beat on the company — until one day about 30 years ago, Standard Fruit said, “Okay, have it your way. We’ll leave.”

Since then, La Ceiba has suffered horribly. As I tell people, it looks like a city in desperate need of a paint job.

And guess what? The evil and subversive liberals have not built one hospital. They have not built one school. They have not built one park. And of course, they have not built one church. Nor have they given the city any land. And, needless to say, they haven’t created one job.

Today, we call the subversive, evil liberal policies that destroyed La Ceiba “Obamunism.” So, watch out America.

[Nosterrex]

I am a Ditto head, and I have also been a teacher in public education. In logic there is only one choice with two options: true or false. This is the law of the excluded middle. In rhetoric, which is different than logic, we can be given too few options, or we are forced to choose false comparisons. I am not saying that Rush's options are wrong, but there could be more options or better comparisons. I tend to agree with Rush, but with a slight twist. I believe that the liberals in Obama’s administration are both stupid and devious.

[CommieCutter]

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=tCAffMSWSzY#t=28

[GOP Poet]

uh . . . both?

[wintertime]

Dewey and his colleagues took over the teachers colleges so they could indoctrinate the teachers.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It didn't start with Dewey.

Compulsory government schools were the wet dream of the Utopian progressives since the first half of the 1800s. They have **always** been in charge of teacher training and curriculum and textbook development. The push has **always** been toward progressive secularism and socialism.

Also...Since the day the very first government school opened in the mid-1800s children have been indoctrinated in socialism. simply by attending, children learn that the government can take money from their neighbor to pay for a service their parents want for tuition-free. Well????....If government can take money for schooling why not a thousand other wants and needs?

Within one to three generations of compulsory government schools we had:

** the IRS
** the federal reserve
** the direct election of Senators
** the failed League of Nations which was followed by the abominable “one world” U.N.
** Unions
** the feminist movement
** FDR and his New Deal for FOUR terms
** Johnson's Great Society
** the abolishment of the gold standard
** and thousands of socialist offices and programs

Government schools can NOT be reformed because they **are** socialism. Socialism can not be fixed.

[Cicero]

I’m glad to see that I’m not the first to say both. These are not mutually exclusive, by any means. It’s not hard to be stupid AND evil.

Obama and his pals want to wreck the country, but luckily for us he is too stupid to do a good job of it.

Obama is the Affirmative Action Hitler.

[AlexW]

I also say that RUSH is right, as he usually is.
They are either Communist or stupid.
Some, buy not all, are both.

[nathanbedford]

There are other possibilities as well such as the slippery slope argument or the snowball argument that says that deviations from common sense start with baby steps and eventually wander into fields that are no longer deviations from common sense or excursions into absurdity but something much worse. This can occur especially easily when there is no check or balance to restrain the deviation and bring it back to common sense.

If the teachers unions and the educrats of the Dewey school have taken over the educational system even baby steps over 100 years can produce a great geographical deviation. Apart from the PTA, who was there to bring them back on course? The entire incentive system is for a teacher to become an administrator and to do that by selling a whole new approach to a very old problem, teaching Johnnie to read.

I have long been concerned with the Odyssey that leads the country to the place where the Constitution has come to mean almost precisely the opposite of what it meant when it was written. These 180° reversals did not come as stunning pronouncements from the Supremes, they came in baby steps, one accretion adding one more deviation to the last. In this discipline, as in education, there is an unholy axis between the academics and the functionaries at the bar and in the courts. One might think that in an adversarial system there would be abundant checks but, as in education, the way to personal success is to make new law. The results seem similar.

In each discipline the accretions have made the professionals the enemy of the people and the subverters of children, Justice, and the Constitution.

[itsahoot]

Ping to self for later.

[Jack Hydrazine]

What you see in La Ceiba is similar to what you see in Detroit and other Leftist Utopias with their goal to make all of America and the world just like the cited examples.

[HighlyOpinionated]

they’re deliberately undermining the country

BINGO!

The Puppet's Masters know exactly what they're doing. They chose a man they could manipulate. They chose a man with a good speaking voice. They chose a man without a soul. They chose a man with no Patriotism.

Everything is going according to THEIR plan and they laugh at the inevitable "Obama should do this" or "Here's a list of items that will save the USA from destruction." THEY DON'T CARE! People and Politicians can write all kinds of articles, make all kinds of speeches, write all kinds of books on how to "fix" what's broken with the USA. BUT THEIR ENTIRE PLAN WAS TO BREAK THE USA AND THEY DON'T WANT TO FIX IT.

There is no way to change the plans of the Puppet Masters EXCEPT to VOTE OUT ALL THE INCUMBENTS [okay, keep Michele Bachmann]. VOTE OUT MCCAIN AND HIS ILK. VOTE OUT EVERY DEMOCRAT UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 20-10 AND IN 20-12 VOTE IN THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST CONSERVATIVES.

And while you're at it, REMOVE MICHAEL STEELE from GOP Chair and put in someone who is a TRUE Conservative!

[Noumenon]

No, they are evil. Long past time to call things by their proper names.

[Red Badger]

Evil, stupid and subversive..................Pelosi-Reid-Obama................

[Rapscallion]

As a former intelligence analyst I see them as subversive. At first I wondered about "the redistribution of wealth" statement. Then came the uncovering of the inner White House Fifth Column - the czars. Then came the strong-arm tactics of unions and GM takeover. Then PORKULUS. Then the lying about unemployment. All of this accompanied by the mantra that to save the US economy they have to take over health care.

It became clear they were trying to fool the voters. But, the voters are catching on to Obama and his party.

You see each piece is like one tile in a mosaic....after you have more and more "tiles" an image begins to emerge. The picture gets clearer and clearer.

Now I see that any liberal democrat who calls himself a Progressive is part of the subversive conspiracy to quietly overthrow the America we knew, its Constitution, its Republic and put in its place a communistic socialistic state.

In my opinon they are totally subersive of everything America does and should stand for.

The only question now is can America survive their onslaught?