Here is the video of President Barack Obama’s speech to schoolchildren — the speech that caused some conservative Republican parents to yank their kids from school, others to forbid their schools to show it to them, and districts in several states to either not offer it or make it strictly optional.
Judge for yourself:
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Do you think this generation of children can recover from this speech which critics said fostered a cult of personality, was socialist, Marxist, liberal partisan indoctrination?
FOOTNOTE: I’ve been looking for a video of Ronald Reagan’s speech to school kids, and couldn’t find it. But a reader sends me this from the Daily Kos: several minutes of Reagan’s speech to kids. But don’t far-right Republicans who defend the Glenn Beck-propelled controversy make the argument that it is highly that it is inappropriate for a President to enter into classrooms and talk directly to kids? So Reagan (and George HW Bush) were wrong, too? Here’s Reagan:
Which speech seems a tad more political to you (and to spare the inevitable name-calling, FYI I voted for Ronald Reagan)?
UPDATE: What will Obama’s far-right critics find objectionable in tihs speech? Dick Polman has the answers..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.