What's Your Contribution Going to Be?

Some reaction to Obama's speech today:

Andrew Sullivan:

Sit down. Take a deep breath. This is what the commie/fascist Muslim alien who
became president via a forged birth certificate is telling your kids:

Newt Gingrich, on Today:

President Reagan did it, President H.W. Bush did it. If he could give a speech tomorrow night in the tone of his speech today to the students, this country would be much better off ... It's a good speech, I recommend it to everybody if you have any doubts.

Author and teacher Dan Brown (no, not that Dan Brown):

It probably won't make a significant imprint on kids who read the paper everyday, with parents discussing current events. They've already heard the president discuss personal responsibility. They know how their president speaks.

However, the back-to-school speech does have a real chance to touch the typically disconnected students, and that is a substantial upside. These kids are not absorbing the most basic civics information at home; school has to pick up the slack. There is a psychic cost to not knowing a larger world beyond your immediate day-to-day life; American kids need to know their president, whether they support his policy agenda or not.

Michelle Malkin, projecting for all the kooks:

It’s not the speech (as I pointed out last week), it’s the subtext.

It’s the radical activism of the White House Teaching Fellows who designed the education guides tied to Obama’s speech.

It’s the overzealousness of public school educators who have turned classrooms into Obama campaign offices.

It’s the influence of the left-wing social justice crusaders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge on Team Obama.

It’s the Left’s embrace of Obama Chicago pal Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy of “education as the motor-force of revolution.”

It’s the activist tradition of government schools using students as junior lobbyists to pressure legislators for higher education spending, pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage, environmental propaganda, and anti-war causes.

Conor Friedersdorf:

I assume President Obama will offer sound advice to the kids, and I regard him as a perfectly good role model.

But I object to the automatic elevation of presidents generally to the role of “trusted moral leader,” so I wish President Obama and all his successors would eschew that role, rather than entrenching its precedent more deeply.

Mark MacKinnon:

An Oklahoma Republican state senator on Rush Limbaugh’s show accused Obama of trying to create a cult of personality and compared him to Saddam Hussein and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. And a Kansas City radio talk-show host said, “I wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone.”... I don’t question the president’s motives. I assumed he just wanted to give a pep talk to America’s students. Plain and simple. And it’s a damn sad thing when something as innocent as a presidential speech to inspire the nation’s schoolchildren becomes the subject not of admiration and encouragement but derision and contempt.

Ben Smith, Daniel Larison, Hugh Hewitt, and The Weekly Standard:

*crickets*

So while there has been some reaction, most of it is reasoned and clear-headed. But if you tune into the corporate media outlets like Fox News, CNN, and the networks, it will be wall-to-wall "Is Obama Indoctrinating Your Kids?"