Stupid Is as Stupid Does

In my house, "stupid" is a bad word. But sometimes it's the only one that fits.

The White House announced last week that President Obama would make a back-to-school speech to America's students on the importance of education. No big deal - Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush made similar speeches. This time, however, the right wing exploded in blind paranoid rage, calling the speech "indoctrination" and comparing it to recruitment for the Hitler Youth.

Displaying a fine disregard for irony as well as facts, wingnuts galore told parents to pull their kids out of school to prevent them from hearing a speech urging them to stay in school.

With parents driven to hysteria by all the screaming, the media has finally realized that the people pushing this stuff really are nuts. John Harwood of that red network CNBC put it best:

Let's face it, in a country of three hundred million people there are a lot of stupid people too, because if you believe that's it's somehow unhealthy for kids for the president to say work hard and stay in school, you're stupid.

So after these last few days of idiotic tumult in the schools, we now have the prepared text of Obama's speech tomorrow. Just as everyone feared, it's chock-full of socialist exhortations to lock up all ObamaCare opponents in FEMA concentration camps and worship Chairman Obama for the god he is.

Nah, just kidding. As the sane parts of the country knew all along, it's your standard education speech. Obama will talk about students' responsibility for their own education, their need to put down the Xbox and pick up the textbook. To do any less would be a disservice not just to themselves but to the country as a whole:

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor - maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine - but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life - I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can't drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn't just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You'll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don't do that - if you quit on school - you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.

So - that's that, right? You wish.

I absolutely guarantee that the usual crowd of teabaggers and blind Obama-haters, who have never let facts get in the way of anything, will not let this go. Rather, they will seize on Obama's comments to "prove" that he's pushing socialism, regardless of any facts or sanity. Or they will claim that the prepared text is merely a ruse, and that he will tell kids something very different tomorrow.

Or something else equally crazy and, yes, stupid.