Trojan horse?

In trying to get a read on the controversy surrounding President Obama’s scheduled speech to public school kids next Tuesday, I’m left more than a little confused. From what I gather, the speech is supposed to be about the importance of education and staying in school — seemingly pretty innocuous stuff, right? But we’re hearing all these reports of people fearing that Obama has an underlying intent to “brainwash” kids with a “socialist message”.

Granted, I generally support Obama and I also don’t have kids, so thinking about this requires an extra degree of objectivity for me. But I think if I had school-aged kids and George W. Bush, for argument’s sake, was still in office and planning to give a speech to my kids about education (and assuming he hadn’t announced plans to also discuss the merits of, say, torture or preemptive war doctrine in his speech), I really think I’d be okay with it. Although I disagreed with many of Bush’s policies, I don’t believe he was, or is, an evil man. Similarly, I assume that most conservatives employ sufficient acumen to disagree with Barack Obama — even passionately — without assigning him the title of “evil”, “antichrist”, “socialist”, etc.

Barring some sort of dark, elaborate conspiracy by the White House to use a speech on education as a trojan horse to convert American kids into Nazis, I think when Tuesday comes, most of us will be wondering why such a big deal was made of this.