The current president stormed into office with a bold agenda. He would be known as the Education President, a bold endeavor for a man who is yet to correctly pronounce "nuclear." But the man from Texas had earned a mandate by virtue of overwhelming support at the ballot box. In the general election, fifty-five percent of Supreme Court Justices voted in his favor. Six days after a successful bid for office, the victor pressed the agenda. At a news conference in Texas, he declared, "The education issue ought to be discussed about." It marked a new era for American public schools.
One year into the current administration, the president signed into law the "No Child Left Behind Act." The law provided choice for students enrolled in failing schools as early as autumn 2002. It would issue report cards for schools and monitor their performance. It implement standards based assessments and ensure that all classes were taught by a qualified teacher. (She should know how to pronounce "nuclear.") In short, we would no longer be a nation of dumb asses. Okay, maybe we'll still be dumb asses, but children will overcome that obstacle.
As 2002 yielded to the current year, the Education President noticed that he was also pretty skilled in the art of bombing brown people. With honed expertise, he turned his attention to one particular brown person who had, in his words, "tried to kill my dad." Unfortunately, the Brown Bombing President lacked justification for this particular bombing. So he made one up.
The man from Crawford claimed Saddam Hussein had many, many weapons capable of mass destructing. He had anthrax. He had mustard gas. He bought yellow cakes in order to develop a new-kya-luhr weapon. If that wasn't enough, the president put him in bed with the one brown person we really wanted to bomb, Osama bin Laden.
And so it goes. The yellow cake was Hostess®. The mustard gas was agricultural run-off and if you pick apart enough cow pies in the Iraqi country side, then you'll probably find some anthrax. The only person Osama bin Laden may hate more than the man from Crawford, TX is Saddam Hussein. But none of this matters to the Brown Bombing President. He ousted the man who tried to "kill my dad." All was well in Crawford.
The administration's campaign was a complete success. In a poll last week, it was announced that almost 70% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda and the September 11th attacks. They assert this belief despite an absense of evidence to validate the contention. The only government officials to make this association, were found in the upper ranks of the current administration. They have since backed off for lack of evidence.
The gullibility which made possible the fiasco in the Iraq was not lost on the current administration. If, as they claim, public education is in a state of disarray, then perhaps poor education helped grease the ass that accepted reams of lies out of Washington. If Washington were to adequately fund programs enacted with intent to improve education, then perhaps future administrations will not enjoy such leverage.
Allocations for the No Child Left Behind Act are now 6.1 billion dollars behind the original appropriation.
