August 30, 2006 10:00 PM UTC

I love Rick O'Donnell

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• by: w0nderm0nkey

This guy’s great. It’s like he had a list of “ideas to shoot yourself in the foot with” and has been working on it since college. The Social Security thing is fun and will play well on TV, but some more recent things are great too. The Perlmutter campaign dug out an old article yesterday that really highlights the new Republican ideals. (I can’t link to the original Denver Post archive because it costs money to view, but the campaign posted the complete article at the bottom of the press release here)

If you don’t feel like reading, basically he calls for a new American “rite of passage” through the conscription of all high school senior males into a mandatory national service corps. We would save money on high schools! We’d have lots of young men to send to patrol the border, work in national forests, wherever we’re missing labor, send in the teenagers!

So what does this say about O’Donnell?
Most obviously, gender matters with respect to education. The boys are wasting their time in high school, but apparently it’s a good thing for girls. For boys the final semester of high school is a “blow-off year” (his words) so why bother? Nevermind planning for college, getting through your AP classes, spending your last months living at home grappling with the idea that you’re about to set out on your own…nah. None of those things matter for boys. And girls are an afterthought to the current batch of Republicans, so why bother?

The other thing that strikes me is the lack of family responsibility he is willing to accept. It’s the same as the video game/TV/music regulations…the Republicans in charge don’t want anybody to have to pay attention to their kids, so if we just let the government regulate everything we’ll all be better off! Picture a world where Republicans all have their way…strict regulations on what is considered acceptable in the media; nothing but Tetris on your Xbox 360; no sex anywhere, which is good because abortions would be illegal; and then when they hit their senior year boys get sent off so somebody else can “make a man” out of ’em.

Also there’s coverage of this in today’s Post.

x-posted in the comments over at SquareState.