Why do our children always disappoint us? We spend 18 years carefully teaching and molding our kids, hoping they avoid the mistakes we made, praying they become upstanding, hard-working adults…Still, we lecture: Join the Army, don’t join the Army. Become a doctor, not a teacher. And for heaven’s sake, don’t go into journalism.I heard that one, and like many kids, ignored the wisdom of my parents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Because newspaper journalism has always been the career equivalent of wearing a nose ring?I digress; Tevlin is writing about the decision by Harrison Bachmann – son of Representative Michele Bachmann, CD6 congresswoman and target of the left’s most unseemly permanent rage – to join “Teach for America”, an affiliate of “Americorps”.<\/p>\n
Maybe it’s the Lord’s way of keeping the world upright?…So it has to sting right now for Rep. Michele Bachmann.<\/p>\n
Here’s what Bachmann said about President Obama’s plan to expand AmeriCorps, a program that puts young adults to work making the world a better place by teaching disadvantaged kids and helping the poor:<\/p>\n
“[It’s] under the guise of quote, volunteerism, but it’s not volunteers at all,” she said on the Sue Jeffers radio show in April. “It’s paying people to do work on behalf of government. There are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people get trained in the philosophy the government puts forward and then they have to go work in these politically correct forums.<\/p>\n
“As a parent, I would have a very, very diffiult time seeing my children do this.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In other words, Tevlin sees this as Harrison sticking a thumb in Mom’s eye. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because it fits the template; Jon Tevlin and everyone he knows\u00a0hates\u00a0<\/em>Michele Bachmann and everything she stands for; therefore,\u00a0everyone\u00a0<\/em>must hate her, and everything Rep. Bachmann does must be suffused with perfidy.
\nReally. \u00a0Everything. \u00a0Including the workings of her family life – because we all know that the family of\u00a0every\u00a0<\/em>family-values-flogging Christian Conservative, especially the women, look more like an episode of\u00a0Moral Orel\u00a0<\/em>than anything like the rest of our lives! \u00a0Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant<\/em>! \u00a0Larry Craig – wide stance wide stance wide stance hahahahahahah! \u00a0And Harrison Bachmann has signed up with something Michele criticized!:<\/p>\nThe last application deadline was in February, and successful candidates were notified within two months, according to Kerci Marcello Stroud, national communications director of TFA.So when Bachmann issued her screed, her son might have already been accepted, and certainly would have applied. Ouch.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<>“Ouch”. \u00a0Because\u00a0of course\u00a0<\/em>any decision Harrison makes just\u00a0has\u00a0<\/em>to be a political dagger aimed at his mother’s heart. \u00a0Just like young Jon mortified his parents by becoming a newspaper reporter. \u00a0It all fits!Except that it doesn’t. \u00a0Listen to the Jeffers broadcast. \u00a0I transcribed the relevant part – badly, but it should give you the right idea:<\/p>\nThe original language of the bill was “Mandatory service” for government. right now, the language is voluntary, but just last week a Democrat colleague introduced language to make it mandatory. I believe when it’s all said and done that there’s a very real chance that young people could be put into mandatory service, and there’s a real concern that there are provisiions for what I’d call “re-education camps” for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosphy that the govenrment puts forward, and then they have to go and work in some of these politically correct forums…it appears there’s a political agenda behind all of this, and if young poeple are mandated to go into this, I’d have a very, very difficult time watching my children do this. Again, it’s a huge power grab, and at a cost of billions of dollars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Listened to\u00a0in context<\/em>, it’s fairly clear that it’s not “volunteerism”, much less the volunteers or the jobs they do, that Bachmann is attacking; it’s the politicization of the program. \u00a0She would hate to see her, or anyone’s, children used as raw material in a politicized compulsory service scheme.<\/p>\nWhich the Democrats want to make it.<\/p>\n
In the future.<\/p>\n
Thank you, Harrison, for your service. Here’s hoping you inspire kids to dream, and get inspired in the process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Who knows, maybe you’ll even have an opportunity for a teaching moment with some political leaders, but I doubt it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And who knows, Harrison; maybe you can teach a high school journalism class. \u00a0Where you can teach young kids to get their facts straight and refrain from superimposing their mindsets onto other people, in order to skew and caricature them. \u00a0But I…<\/p>\n
…no, that would be a cheap shot, wouldn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last year, when the Strib went through its big show of cost-cutting in the Columnist Corner at Strib Tower, some of us dared to hope that with Nick Coleman being eased out (maybe), things might change. \u00a0That the “city columnist” slot might turn into something other than a relentless shill space for the DFL. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}