RUSH: “A Virginia middle school…” That’s junior high for those of you in Rio Linda. I don’t know that they have schools in Rio Linda, so I don’t know that you even know what a junior high is. It’s where you send the kids during the day to get them out of the house, for those of you in Rio Linda. “A Virginia middle school teacher recently forced his students to support President Barack ObamaÂ’s re-election campaign by conducting opposition research in class against the Republican presidential candidates. The 8th grade students, who attend Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County, were required to seek out the vulnerabilities of” Santorum, Romney, Gingrich Ron Paul, “and forward them to the Obama campaign.”
An eighth grade teacher assigned as a class project Republican “opposition research” and the kids were instructed to send their results to Obama. “‘This assignment was just creepy beyond belief — like something out of East Germany during the Cold War,’ one frustrated father, who asked for his family to remain anonymous, told The Daily Caller. The assignment was for students to research the backgrounds and positions of each of the GOP candidates for president and find ‘weaknesses’ in them, the parent explained. From there, students were to prepare a strategy paper to exploit those weaknesses” in the Republican candidates that they found “and then to send their suggestions to the Obama campaign.
“Liberty teacher Michael Denman,” the culprit here, who “declined to comment, unveiled the assignment in mid-January when he broke the Civics HonorÂ’s class into four groups, one for each Republican candidate. The students were then to collaborate as a group and research the backgrounds of their assigned candidate. Denman assigned two kids to write a paper revealing the identified ‘weaknesses,’ two to write the attack strategy paper and two others to locate an individual inside the Obama campaign to whom they could send the information.
“‘My classmates donÂ’t actually know a lot, but a few of us tended to agree that the most recent instruction on this project just didnÂ’t seem right,’ one of the students told TheDC. ‘Mr. Denman didnÂ’t tell us where to find the information, just to research on them.’ As a result, the school received multiple phone calls from parents frustrated with the political nature of the assignment, the father told TheDC. ‘I was shocked that a school teacher would so blatantly politicize the curriculum of a middle school classroom,’ the parent said.”
Why are you surprised, sir?
“‘I asked [my child] if a similar assignment had been handed out to examine the background and positions of President Obama to see if the teacher was at least being bipartisan.’ No similar assignment was given to research ObamaÂ’s history, identify his weaknesses or pass them along to the Republican candidates. John Torre, a spokesman on behalf of the Fairfax County Public School system, insists that students were never instructed to actually send their results to the Obama campaign. ‘Instead, the teacher simply asked his students to find out the name of the office that would receive such information,’ Torre wrote in an e-mail to TheDC.”
What, the teacher was gonna send it?
So the teacher is being backed up by the superintendent and the principal, but they’re not saying much beyond that. So let’s see. First it was making students recite chants, and then students were singing creepy songs for Obama, and now a school has assigned “opposition research” as a class project. I think every parent needs to stop and consider what happens when a political party puts children to work for free. That’s what’s happening here. This teacher, this Denman (obviously a liberal Democrat), decided to have these kids do some opposition research for the Democrats at no charge. Turn this around. If this had been a conservative teacher seeking opposition research against Obama?
Oh, can you imagine the explosion once that had been learned?
The teacher would have been fired. He’d be gone, never to work again.
The students would be sent to reeducation camps.
It doesn’t surprise me any longer.