Point well made – well taken.

It takes a lot of strength to hold up the roof of a house, while the structure and foundation are being laid.

The lecture was like putting the cart before the horse. A school district rises and falls with the community of parents and caregivers, who have a vested interest in the success of their children/students.

His 20 minute pep rally would have been better spent getting the message across that single teen mothers and absent fathers thwart the educational process and will enslave another generation into poverty. Instead, he reminded the kids that he made mistakes when in actuality it was his parents, who made a pile of them and that he just ‘lucked’ out growing up the first 10 years with his mother and step father and the next 10 in Hawaii (not exactly your inner city experience) with his grandparents.

Similarly, if the President of the United States has to lecture people on the things Obama just lectured about, then maybe the *schools* are failing and need to be fixed. Yet Obama’s Democrats have been the primary obstacle to either imposing meaningful performance standards on the public schools or enabling meaningful competition to them.

My daughter, incidentally, wasn’t the only child to find Obama dull.

I have not perused the speech myself, but I found a blog comment to the point. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address to adults was two minutes long. Obama’s address to children was twenty minutes long. Are we surprised they found it boring?

FYI the song was intended by the composer and lyricist to be a modern surrogate for a genuine Nazi anthem; it’s not just a “Broadway show tune,” not at all. It was written for the musical in the style of songs used by the Nazis. Stormfront, a Neo-Nazi group, has taken the song as sung in the film as one of its inspirations. The lyricist, Fred Ebb, is (I understand) Jewish, but that makes no difference to today’s Nazis. They like the song anyway, and have essentially claimed it.

The old Nazis did have some beautiful songs, and this one is written in what is called the “Laendler” form; it’s a type of folk song, traditional, and very easy to sing.

There are many parallels that one can draw between political rallies and events of today and decades ago. I think many of the communist parades, songs and spectacles must have been thrilling — as they were intended to be. Today’s political extravaganzas have precedents, some of them politically ugly. Obama posing triumphantly before his fake Greek temple comes to mind. Sometimes his body language reminds me of Mussolini, and those children’s choirs singing his praises make my skin crawl — too, too creepy (IMHO it’s wrong to do that to tiny kids). Well, whether it’s well-intended or a mistake in parenting, it’s all showmanship. Noting the parallels and similarities is not evil.

So I think you would be perfectly correct to compare Obama’s impact on your child with the impact of Nazi propaganda. Like any politician of whatever stripe, Obama pitched, and the kids responded — like kids. (When the first Bush did it, the Democrats howled bloody murder, though, and held hearings.)

(((sigh))) I am jealous.

Please contact your local school board and ask them if they have enough pull to deliver the rest of us for a day.

Our school system didn’t even mention the speech. As my 9 year old said, “It was an Obama-free day for me.”