Socialism claims another 12-year-old

Posted by Andrew Heller The Flint Journal September 10, 2009 12:00PM

I am such a bad father.

On Tuesday, my 12-year-old daughter - who was in school, minding her own business - was forced to watch an address by ... I am so mad about this I can hardly bring myself to utter his name ... President Obama.

OK, all right, she wasn't "forced" per se. Apparently her "school" allowed kids whose parents didn't want them witnessing this abomination to go to the library, where they were safe from presidential cooties and free to enrich their young, fertile minds with some light reading, like, say, "How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," by that great American, the ever open-minded Ann Coulter.

But, stupid me, I forgot that the speech, broadcast to schools nationwide Tuesday, was on, and therefore didn't send Annie to school with an anti-permission slip.

My only defense is that it slipped my mind because I tend to think that a school kid listening to the president , even one as evil and loathsome as Obama, isn't the worst thing in the world.
In fact, when I was a kid, I'd have probably liked it. To a kid, 20 minutes out of class is 20 minutes out of class, even if you have to sit and absorb a little socialism, as I'm sure my sweet Annie did.

Oh, and don't try to tell me she didn't. I know the Obama camp swore the speech wouldn't have anything to do with politics, unlike the school address once given by President George H.W. Bush, in which he asked for kids to send him letters describing how they could help his agenda.
And, yes, I know Obama apparently kept to his word and delivered a pretty stock stay- in-school message. But that doesn't mean there wasn't hanky-panky going on. Top conservative scientists are, as we speak, close to discovering that liberal/socialist slogans such as "What's yours is the government's" and "Deficits rule!" were subliminally encoded into Obama's message.
Absurd? Think again, Trotsky. We're talking about a guy here who was born in a foreign country and raised on a diet of socialism and hatred for real Americans, especially those making over
$250,000 a year, then smuggled into the U.S. and installed as president.

So, no, I wouldn't put anything past him, including subliminal messages.

I can only hope that Annie's all right. Libero-Socialism, I'm told, has a long incubation period, and she might not exhibit signs of it until she's of voting age.

She seems fine for the moment, although in my dinner-time debriefing of her I did detect some troubling signs.

"What did you think of Obama's talk?" I asked.

"Real good," she said. "He said that if you quit school you're letting yourself down and your country down."

"You didn't feel like you were being indoctrinated?" I asked, eyeing her carefully.
"Indoctrawhat?" she said, wrinkling her nose. "You're weird. By the way, I need money for tumbling class. Can I have some?"

I gave it to her, even though asking for a hand-out is one of the first signs of creeping liberalism.
What can I say, I'm a bad dad.