Re: Information on NCLB

[QCao009@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/11/04 9:00:22 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
gkc@louisville.edu writes:
I thought the members of this list might be interested in this useful
information about NCLB.  Many here have misconceptions about this law.
No, no misconceptions here.  This is for you, George:

  
We See That Now 
A heartfelt -- no -- abject -- no -- craven apology to the right from the 
left for our campaign of hate, anger and malice against God's own president. 
By Tony Hendra
Issue Date: 2.1.04 
Print Friendly | Email Article 
We confess. It's all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We did 
it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We 
poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation's most august 
publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his integrity, smeared his 
family, invaded his privacy, tried desperately to drag him down to our own 
filthy, rock-bottom, sewer-dwelling level. 
There is no parallel between your measured criticism of Bill Clinton and our 
vile attacks on George W. Bush. Bill Clinton deserved everything thrown at him 
because a corrupt and evil man who gains the White House by underhanded means 
should be attacked with every weapon at the disposal of a free press. And 
yes, it's true, just as your more sagacious radio hosts have maintained: Hillary 
Clinton does owe her success to the practice of witchcraft. And no, it's not 
true that ridiculing Chelsea at the most vulnerable stage in her development 
was the media equivalent of child molestation. Chelsea Clinton was fair game 
because she is the spawn of Satan. Scurrilous of us to suggest that the 
tirelessly moderate and civil proponent of these and so many other truths, Robert 
Bartley, now resides in the circle of hell reserved for hate-mongers and bigots! 
Mr. Bartley dwells in the bosom of his Republican creator. We see that now. 
George W. Bush cannot be, as we've screamed till we're blue in the face, the 
cretinous finger puppet of an incalculably cynical and malevolent cabal and a 
ruthless neo-Confederate, bent on creating a plutocratic ruling class at home 
and a rapacious corporate imperium abroad. He's one or the other. We cannot 
have it both ways. We see that now. 
Similarly, we can hardly denigrate Rupert Murdoch and his "gutter press" 
while at the same time carping that without him the right would be a marginalized 
mob of obscurantist paranoids kept on life support by retrograde trust-fund 
nut jobs. Mr. Murdoch is a great populist. Lowest-common-denominator programming 
is an honorable tradition in both the United States and the United Kingdom. 
Taking such programming to China, where he is equally solicitous of a proto 
superpower whose interests are frequently inimical to ours, does not mean that 
Mr. Murdoch is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or that NewsCorp's money is 
somehow "tainted." It's despicable of us to suggest that all those hardworking 
journalists -- from Bill O'Reilly to William Kristol -- who take his 
supposedly dirty money are likewise tainted! We see that now. 
What demon put into our so-called minds the idea that the ghastly tragedy of 
that bright morning in September 2001 might have been prevented because the 
Bush administration had received warnings for a month that some sort of attack 
might be coming? And that the president and his advisers had ignored that 
intelligence and then made use of the tragedy to seize the draconian emergency 
powers they craved and get the economy back onto a perpetual-war footing? How 
could we even entertain such thoughts? What venom flowed through our 
hate-infarcted hearts? 
We're sorry for our endless ranting about oil being the lifeblood of the Bush 
family circle, and The Carlyle Group existing as nothing more than a gigantic 
corporate kickback to its members for faithful service while in office, and 
the Bush team comprising the selfsame men who supported Saddam Hussein to the 
hilt while he was committing most of his genocidal atrocities and therefore 
making them his guilty accomplices. These are vicious, hateful untruths. We see 
that now. 
The First Amendment does not give us the right to screech that young 
Americans are dying in Iraq so that George W. Bush can get himself legitimately 
elected president. It's a bald-faced lie that his bald-faced lies about weapons of 
mass destruction cost them their lives. Our brave men and women in uniform know 
when they enlist that there is always the chance they may have to pay the 
ultimate sacrifice. Their motives are never -- as we so squalidly claimed in the 
wake of the Jessica Lynch affair -- to get a higher education because the 
military is now the sole conduit to it for the two-thirds of Americans who can't 
afford it. What a despicably mercenary motive to impute to our heroes! And in 
any case, why isn't the re-election of an epochal president a lofty patriotic 
aim, worth the sacrifice -- as our great defense secretary has implied -- of a 
few lives? Why would this aim fill us with rage and hate, instead of quiet 
pride? 
We were wrong to call George W. Bush's huge tax cuts legalized looting, wrong 
about the replacement of a $5 trillion surplus with a $3 trillion deficit. 
No, that is not $8 trillion down the drain in three short years. We arrived at 
that ridiculous conclusion by juggling the figures. If you're as egregiously 
partisan as we, you can make figures prove anything. We see that now. 
We apologize from the bottom of our hearts for our unfounded suspicions about 
the plane crash that killed Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone and his family. 
Only a wild-eyed conspiracy nut would link it to the crash had killed Missouri 
Gov. Mel Carnahan. Nostra culpa! Grief unhinged our better judgment. Hey, 
Democrats die in planes around election time. That's life. We better get used to it. 
What drives us to ask -- so shrilly, so annoyingly -- why Ken Lay still isn't 
in prison? Are we really certain that he deprived hundreds of thousands of 
people of their savings? That he helped hatch a plot to bring down the Democrats 
in California by destabilizing that state's power supply? So what if that's 
now happened? Has Mr. Lay done anything that is technically wrong? 
Realizing now the awesome power of prayer, we'll stop praying every moment of 
every day that Tom DeLay gets snatched up in the rapture. We realize, too, 
that the sign in his office -- "This Could Be The Day" (i.e., Judgment Day) -- 
does not utterly disqualify Mr. DeLay from assessing the best long-term 
interests of the nation. We believe, with him, that the poor are entirely to blame 
for their own poverty, and that if -- sorry, when -- our savior returns, he will 
indeed own a concealed-carry permit. We know now that Mr. DeLay is not 
precisely the kind of religious lunatic the Founders had in mind when separating 
church and state; that he and his co-religionists are in no way brutish, heathen, 
hate-driven humbugs whose fundamentalism makes Osama bin Laden look like the 
archbishop of Canterbury. We hope and pray that Mr. DeLay will guide the 
destiny of America till the trump of doom. Even if it is next Tuesday. 
Looking back on the decade-plus of our boundless ill will and partisan fury, 
we've come to understand something absolutely vital about that glorious year 
1989, the year you won the Cold War: The reason the Cold War had to be won was 
that it made the world a two-party system. One of them had to go. It's the 
same in our great nation. What's the point of having two (or even one and a half) 
parties when it leads to nothing but unending conflict, frustration, 
stagnation and despair? For America to bring the message to the world that ours is the 
best and only way, we must have unanimity. One party indivisible under God. 
Yet ever since 1989, we've been fighting a new Cold War -- in Congress, in 
the culture, in the media, in the nation's schools and courts and bedrooms. 
It's time for us to ... surrender. We're tearing down the Berlin Wall of rage 
and malice we've erected between you and us. We do this before it is too 
late, before you reach the point where you will be forced -- however reluctantly 
-- to investigate us, confiscate our property, search our houses, seize our 
personal records, detain us sine die, suspend habeas corpus, take reprisals 
against our loved ones, hold show trials, send us to re-education camps -- whatever 
you in your impeccable judgment deem necessary to preserve the homeland from, 
well, the likes of us. 
But -- a huge "but," we know -- if in your great hearts you can find the room 
to forgive us, if even the meanest of positions can be found for us in the 
new dispensation, let us serve you. We'll do anything you want, no matter how 
menial: deleting hard drives, wiretapping journalists, delivering bags of cash 
to senators, transporting assets to the Caymans, firing pregnant Mexicans, 
evicting the disabled, laying bets for virtuous windbags, beating up young gay 
men, escorting Muslims to the border, performing sexual favors for The Heritage 
Foundation -- whatever you need we'll do it, and for free. 
Some of us even have advanced skills to put at your disposal. We could help 
discredit Europe's socialistic health and welfare systems and nonprofit public 
utilities so The Carlyle Group can privatize them. We could produce inspiring 
movies about the great Americans who are ushering in the thousand years of 
prosperity that are just around the corner. We could create upbeat news stories 
for the Ministry of Truth you plan for George W. Bush's second term. 
We come to you not just as sinners but as supplicants, begging not just 
forgiveness but inclusion. There's a reason God named the right the right: Because 
it's right. You have a monopoly on the truth, and you always have and you 
always will. 
We see that now. We really do. 
Tony Hendra 

Quan