Friday, August 05, 2011

Why Michelle Malkin Should Be Caged Like a Rabid Shih Tzu (Teacher Edition):
Mostly, the Rude Pundit had stopped giving a happy monkey fuck what conservative columnist Michelle Malkin has had to say on any given topic because it's boringly predictable and shittily written. But her latest piece attacking Matt Damon's defense of public school teachers at the Save Our Schools rally in DC has a line that's infuriating because you can bet that Malkin thought she was being oh-so-clever.

No, it's not her repetition of right-wing bullshit, like about tenure and salaries and the canard that teachers only work for 180 days a year. Ever heard of prep? Grading? It's 180 days in the classroom, full-time. It'd be like saying the only minutes that count are the ones that Malkin spends tapping the keyboard, not the time spent ordering assistants to do research, reading that research, beating the assistant with a plastic bottle of cheap tequila, weeping apologies to the assistant, forcing the assistant to watch as she masturbates furiously with 10-inch spiked dildo, and ordering the assistant to clean said dildo. It's all part of the process that it takes in order to piss out such driblets of wisdom like this attack on the alleged squishy multiculturalism that conservatives want to squeeze out of schools:

"Out: Reading is fundamental. In: Feeling is fundamental."

And it's that line that's like watching a moose shit on a dead child in the forest. Because, see, "Reading is fundamental" as a phrase exists because of the nonprofit program Reading Is Fundamental. And RIF, which provides books and help with reading to low-income kids, got a great deal of its funding from the federal government. It is a demonstrable good in teaching, you know, those fundamentals, like, well, shit, reading.

In March of this year, the Republican-led House of Representatives cut the funding for RIF from the federal budget. That means over 4 million kids won't get that help with basic skills. Maybe this is feeling too much, but it sure seems like if you really gave a goddamn about kids learning, you might wanna keep around something that's worked for over four decades.

Damon's right: Malkin and conservatives want to narrow down the problems of education in America to selfish teachers sucking the system dry. And then they take pride in gutting the school system and any programs that might educate the poor.

Oh, wait. Now it makes sense.