HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
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Thursday, October 14, 2004Just the Good Ol' Boys
So I watched the final debate last night. I'll be honest, I've had enough debating to last me through Easter at this point and there were one or two times when I retired to the other room for a little Microsoft Hearts TM. But I did watch the great majority of it. It was either that or watch the fershluggener Yankees beat the living shit out of Pedro Martinez, the very thought of which makes me ill.
I'll give this much to Bush, last night was his least moronic outing in this debate season. I would go so far as to say he almost pulled off the whole "not retarded" thing. Almost. He was a little less angry this time. A little less like he wanted to whip out his dick and use it to smack anybody who disagreed with him in their face. Take a moment to picture that. I'll wait. Anyway, this time, he was in his cute lil' playful frat boy mode. He told "joke" after "joke" and then laughed at how "funny" he was. The man has the dumbest goddamn laugh this side of Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazard. Say, there's an idea. For the big-screen version with Sean William Scott and Jessica Simpson, they oughtta sign up ol' George to play the dipshit sheriff. Can't you see him stomping around with cowshit on his shoes lamenting, "Oh, them Dukes, them Dukes." I gotta say, Bin Laden's been about as effective at thwarting Bush as Bo and Luke were at puttin' one over on ol' Boss Hogg. Bush kept on coming back and coming back to his No Child Left Behind policies. He was bragging about them. When they asked him what he thought could be done about manufacturing jobs disappearing, he steered the subject to No Child Left Behind. When asked an economic question, he brought it back to No Child Left Behind. Folks, No Child Left Behind is a miserable goddamn failure. I'm a teacher. I don't really want to be, but I am, so I have seen what his policies are doing. First off, remember that this is the man who was all for vouchers in 2000, which lets you know right away that he doesn't give a fuck about public education. Secondly, if you were unaware, you need to know that, even if he had found a million gallons of pixie dust that would make everything in public education function like clockwork--which he hasn't--he has not gotten the funding for 1/100,000 of those pixie particles to be distributed to the kids. What he has done is to forced standardized tests down the throats of schools all across the country. He hasn't put any steak sauce on it to entice us to eat it, he hasn't given us a nice pint of beer to wash it down. He has made sure that schools are so freaked out about standardized test scores that they spend a huge chunk of their time teaching test-taking skills instead of teaching the subject matter. Standardized tests, at their best, don't accurately measure what someone has learned. People do not all think alike. There are students who just don't do well on these tests, for whatever reason; they get nervous and freaked out; the bubble sheets for their answers confuse them; they take too long in the beginning and then have to cut corners to even finish. A kid who gets solid grades in their school work can fail one of these even when their teacher knows that they know the material. I had two students in my class last year who worked very hard. They were not the number one and two students in my class, mind you, but they were definitely in the top ten. For whatever reason, they didn't do well on the standardized tests and they had to go to summer school, along with the worst student in my class. This is not fair. Beyond that, beyond holding schools financially accountable for how well their students score on standardized tests, Bush, or, as I'll be referring to him for the rest of this post, Fucko Bazoo, has done squat for schools. I suppose there may be schools in districts with incredibly high tax bases who are very much fine, thank you, with what Bush has done. Not in the Bronx, though. So the fact that he kept bringing it up last night didn't exactly sit well with me. Nor did his smirking, nor did his distortions of Kerry's Senate votes, nor did his use, almost verbatim of the Drug Companies' stated reasoning about importing cheaper drugs from Canada. Two weeks ago, in Newsweek, I saw an ad put out by, I think, Glaxo-Kline-Smith. It might have been another one of those huge evil fuckers, but you get the drift. They were saying that drugs that come from Canada are unsafe because they might actually be from some third world hellhole that makes 90% of its gross national product by exporting shoddy pharmaceuticals. Y'see, that's why drug companies don't want cheaper alternatives to their disgustingly overpriced products. Because they care about us. Doesn't that just warm the cockles of your fucking heart? And Bush has used this exact shpiel! You see? Not only do his campaign staff feed him words to say, so do huge corporations. Once again, I've written something not all that funny. Mostly, I guess, because right now, Bush isn't making me laugh. He's making me want to puke. I pray to fucking God we can serve our country some Syrup of Ippicac next month and vomit George W. right the fuck out of the White House.
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