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.
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Let’s pull boys – and only boys – out of school during their last semester so that they can prove their manliness (and so we can have yet another reason to complain that those damn Liberals are biased against men – ’cause we’d blame it all on them when male college graduation dropped even further…)
What’s next, Rick? Got anything racist to say like the guy you want to replace?
I can just picture it now “Listen, men! We are going to catch them there illegals, and you shall be assisted by Tom Tancredo. Take it away, Double-T!”
Aside from the obvious women are smarter than men jab that I howled at when I read the article, a couple of other things grabbed my attention. One, no male would be able to finish high school, two isnt this a recreation of FDR’s work in rebuilding the economy after the depression and thirdly the rich kid comment. Clearing forests sounds an awful lot like the TVA or similar programs to me.
Conscription service will not jive in this day and age no matter how it is played out.
…to senior Proms all over the country?
that was the first thing my mom said too (literally…I’m not bashing you here). It hadn’t ocurred to me, but you’re both absolutely right.