POLITICSHYPE: Indoctrinating the Children

There's been a bit of a tempest in a teacup lately about Barack Obama speaking to schoolchildren at the beginning of the school year. Let's not get into a debate on the merits of that event, but rather take a look back in time.

Less than a year ago, at the time of this writing, Dubya was still in the White House. Do you think any children were "indoctrinated" during his time in DC? Let's have a look:



Boy, people sure do have short memories these days! Good thing we have YouTube around to keep things real.

And doesn't this particular incident violate some basic religious tenet about false idolatry? Like, say, #4 of the Ten Commandments?

"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." (Exodus 20:4, King James Version)

Gee, it sure seems like it did. What happens to those who violate that particular commandment?

"Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." (Exodus 20:5, King James Version)

There's another commandment that deals with bearing false witness, but let's leave that one alone for a while. If the video above hasn't given you your daily dose of shudders or laughs, well, then please feel free to leave us a comment.

By the way, this is real. It's an excerpt from Jesus Camp, the 2006 documentary that was nominated for an Oscar (best documentary feature).

POLITICSHYPE: Wake Up America!

I don't know about you but.....eeeeekkkkkkkk!

POLITICSHYPE: Juan Cole on Bush and Napoleon

Juan Cole has a brilliant piece up on TomDispatch.com comparing Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt to Dubya's Iraq misadventure:

In both eighteenth century Egypt and twenty-first century Iraq, the dreary reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if not a wicked satire upon, these high-minded pronouncements. The French landed at the port of Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks later, as the French army advanced along the Nile toward Cairo, a unit of Gen. Jean Reynier's division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many armed with muskets. Sgt. Charles Francois recalled a typical scene. After scaling the village walls and "firing into those crowds," killing "about 900 men," the French confiscated the villagers' livestock - "camels, donkeys, horses, eggs, cows, sheep" - then "finished burning the rest of the houses, or rather the huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to these half-savage and barbarous people."

Pitching the Imperial Republic: Bonaparte and Bush on Deck at Truthout