Tag Archives: morality

It’s Circular

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Allison Benedikt, over at Slate, wrote this:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.  Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.  So, pretty bad.

And this:

[I]t seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve.  This would not happen immediately.  It could take generations.  Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Plainly, given her demonstrated ability to think, she must be a product of just such a public school education.

Oh, wait—proudly so:

I went K-12 to a terrible public school.  My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.

It just doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Playing With Guns

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…in this case, just another version of Obamatalk.  Here’s President Barack Obama’s latest [emphasis added]:

If we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, ‘stop doing this,’ that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term[.]

“Shot across the bow,” indeed.  Another example of avoiding doing anything of substance, but rather of satisfying himself with “sound and fury.”

Despite his ego telling him otherwise, no one in the world takes him seriously.  But his playing-with-guns ego trip will kill people.

Responsibility

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First, there was “It’s all Bush’s fault.”

Then there was “The situation is much worse than we thought.”

Then there was “It’s those obstructionist Republicans.”

Then there was “What difference, at this time, does it make?”

Then it metastasized, and he drew a red line: “Movement of chemical weapons is a red line.”

Then it was “We have to evaluate the data.”

Then it was “We’re still weighing the situation.”

Now our Secretary of YachtingState John Kerry, doing is level best to sound like what he thinks a statesman sounds like, says of al Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people last week,

 What is before us today is real, and it is compelling.

Now it’s two things: Obama’s red line was about movement, not actual use.  And it’s

…the international community must respond to the use of chemical weapons.

Responsibility.  This administration should try accepting some.

Of Gas and Men

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From historian Andrew Roberts, in The Wall Street Journal, comes this:

There is a long and honorable history of the civilized world treating those dictators who use poison gas as qualitatively different from the normal ruck of tyrants whose careers have so stained the 20th and 21st centuries.

President Obama, who talks endlessly of the importance of civilized values, must now uphold this one.

What he said.  RTWT.

What Do Progressives

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…have against equal opportunity?

The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

Because, you know, helping students actually to do better so that they can be effectively integrated with their age peers is a Bad Thing.

The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.

After all, parents of underperforming students might wind up aggregating them into schools that actually teach and get academic results in their students.  Since most of the underperforming students in Louisiana tend to be minority children, especially black children, this might tend to aggregate black children into those successful voucher schools rather than leave them trapped in Louisiana’s failing public school system.

Eric Holder’s DoJ made their argument with a straight face.  Consummate actors, they are.

Let’s look at that “minority” status in the Louisiana schools, though.

The New Orleans public school system is 88% African-American.  Now, how could allowing 570 kids to flee the public school system possibly “create a racial imbalance”?

Oh, it’s those minority white students, who would become even more concentrated, that Holder is worrying about.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  We’ll go with that.

Jindal had this about Holder’s move:

After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right.  Shame on them.  Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school.

Can you say disparate impact?  This is the racist outcome—intended or not—of using this meme, even sotto voce.