Educational Blight in Kansas and the GOP Foot-in-Mouth Disease
In the interest of my stomach, I strictly avoided the telecasts of the senatorial interview of John Roberts, a nominee for a Supreme Court seat, but I'm told that another member of the GOP showed the unfortunate state of his mind, by being too eager to get in a word for his state. During a discussion of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, in which segregation of the nation's public schools was moved from the South to the North, Senator Sam Brownback couldn't resist saying something to the effect that he was glad that that case came from his great state of Kansas.
This is like the people of the defeated South saying that they were glad that the war that resulted in the freeing of the slaves took place mostly on their soil. But maybe this sort of skewed thinking shows what it takes to be not only a high-ranking member of the GOP but also a top representative of a state in which there is so much insistence on standing logic on its head by replacing the scientifically accepted theories of Evolution in favor of the fiddlefaddle called Creationism.
I wonder if this man -- whom GWBush probably refers to with a certain slyness as "Brownie," just as he did to Michael Brown, his FEMA chief who was doing such a "heck of a job" but was then quickly dumped -- knows who the bad guys were in that case. Does this mean that the Senator is not familiar with its gist and outcome, which were that the discriminatory policies of the board of education in one of his cities, Topeka, were successfully challenged? Or, if he does know, maybe the significance of the case means nothing to him, and instead he feels that what matters most is to cheer whenever anything involving his state, favorable or unfavorable, comes up, because, as is well-known, any publicity is good publicity.
If an outburst like that doesn't make him look bad on his home turf, then that home is far from blessed, though another of its boards of education, ironically by being too eager to show its devoutness, has shown Kansas to be still afflicted with blight, in its fields of education.
This is like the people of the defeated South saying that they were glad that the war that resulted in the freeing of the slaves took place mostly on their soil. But maybe this sort of skewed thinking shows what it takes to be not only a high-ranking member of the GOP but also a top representative of a state in which there is so much insistence on standing logic on its head by replacing the scientifically accepted theories of Evolution in favor of the fiddlefaddle called Creationism.
I wonder if this man -- whom GWBush probably refers to with a certain slyness as "Brownie," just as he did to Michael Brown, his FEMA chief who was doing such a "heck of a job" but was then quickly dumped -- knows who the bad guys were in that case. Does this mean that the Senator is not familiar with its gist and outcome, which were that the discriminatory policies of the board of education in one of his cities, Topeka, were successfully challenged? Or, if he does know, maybe the significance of the case means nothing to him, and instead he feels that what matters most is to cheer whenever anything involving his state, favorable or unfavorable, comes up, because, as is well-known, any publicity is good publicity.
If an outburst like that doesn't make him look bad on his home turf, then that home is far from blessed, though another of its boards of education, ironically by being too eager to show its devoutness, has shown Kansas to be still afflicted with blight, in its fields of education.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 12:23 PM
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