Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer appeared on CNN today, and accused the White House of changing the content of President Obama's stay-in-school speech in the wake of conservative outrage at political indoctrination -- outrage that he was instrumental in mobilizing, by the way -- and that the original would have been much more politically-oriented.
"Clearly last week there was a plan with the Department of Education," said Greer. "When you ask students to write a letter to the President on, how we can help you with your new ideas, Mr. President, that is leading the students in an effort to push the President's agenda. Now that the White House got their hand in the cookie jar caught, they changed everything, they redid the lesson plans, they released the text, and tomorrow he's gonna give a speech that every president should have an opportunity to give."
Suzanne Malveaux asked Greer if he had any inside information that the White House changed the speech.
"No, I don't," said Greer. "But I would anticipate, based on this President being so vocal and so aggressive about his vision of America, where government is in every aspect of our lives, I believe that the speech that he was gonna give, based on the lesson plans, is different."

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The Commenter Formerly Known as NCSteve
September 7, 2009 6:32 PM
Shorter Greer: "In my head, the imaginary Dangerous Radical Islamofascist Terrorist Fistjabbing Obama who also lives in my head in my head rewrote his speech because of me! Yay me!"
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Mr. Squeezy
September 7, 2009 6:32 PM
I dislike a lot of the people in my country.
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lousgirl84
September 8, 2009 10:20 AM in reply to Mr. Squeezy
ME TOO.
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blmack
September 7, 2009 6:42 PM
They need to quit giving this SOB airtime. It just serves to validate his idiotic theory. No surprise from the MSM though.
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Lynn Dee
September 7, 2009 6:47 PM
These people are insane. And the media can't get enough of them. Phooey.
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CityGuy
September 7, 2009 9:29 PM in reply to Lynn Dee
Yep. These wingnuts are all just tools.
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Mike Licht
September 7, 2009 7:00 PM
Obama school speech: worst fears realized. Brainwashing, Bolshevism and blasphemy. Protect your children!
See:
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/obama-brainwashing-obama-brainwashing/
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bpalmer51
September 7, 2009 8:14 PM
We must find the mole that gave Greer the school speech before it was written. This is outrageous and a witch hunt must be launched to find the scoundrel.
Or we could ask Greer to show us his copy.
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mk3872
September 7, 2009 8:22 PM
Sometimes people are amazed when those that they are demonizing are actually not really as bad as they thought.
See, when you actually believe the drivel coming from Malking & Beck, you find yourself looking very silly when you realize that their hallucinating about a socialist little Hitler in Obama is actually just fantasy.
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Kuyleh
September 7, 2009 8:29 PM
Heaven forbid the President have a vision of America. It's not like he leads the country or anything...
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candideyam
September 7, 2009 8:36 PM
When will progressives figure out this GOPer rope-a-dope? They always do the same thing. They accuse progressive politicians of doing something utterly false, and then claim victory when it doesn't happen.
Yes - we know it's nonsense, but 'baggers don't. They believe it, and they get more charged up when they feel that all their calls and complaints and threats of pulling their children from school resulted in changing the behavior of the friggin' President of the United States. This crap is infectious. It can't be ignored.
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midnight rambler
September 8, 2009 2:38 AM in reply to candideyam
How do you suggest responding, aside from not doing it? When you're dealing with people stupid enough to believe this kind of explanation, they're way, way beyond any kind of rational argument.
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lousgirl84
September 8, 2009 10:22 AM in reply to midnight rambler
EXACTLY!!! One cannot argue or discuss anything with these folks.
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jeffgee
September 8, 2009 10:36 AM in reply to candideyam
NOTHING is going to change the baggers' "minds" Their reptilian brains are the boss of them.
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SilvestriWoman
September 7, 2009 8:50 PM
Jim Greer actually fully supported Obama's vision for America's schoolchildren until he realized doing so would cause him to lose face with the Tea Baggers. Really! This is true! I don't know Greer, or anyone in his organization, but I just know it to be true!
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Agateman
September 7, 2009 9:16 PM in reply to SilvestriWoman
Take Greer and Beck into a bathroom in Minneapolis and let them get acquainted.
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Stiggs
September 8, 2009 2:51 PM in reply to SilvestriWoman
Actually, Greer is covertly pushing to destabilize the government in an attempt to weaken the existing power structure so that business interests can swoop in and fill the created power vacuum. This will lead to weakening of employee, consumer and individual rights in favor of the corporate state (sounds vaguely like fascism...). We will transition to a system that is even more tilted in favor of big businesses where they are handed huge subsidies without batting an eye while any attempt to assist the underprivileged or disadvantaged will be disparaged and ridiculed with the idea that we should rely on individual exceptionalism (Bill Gates did fine for himself and he's a college drop out, you just aren't trying hard enough). A redistribution of wealth upwards, as it were. This will ultimately lead to a two tiered system with power concentrated among a super wealthy ruling class and everyone else living in near poverty with no power, influence or rights worth speaking of.
(I was going to make up some rumor about this guy like "he touches boys" but the fascist route was scarier and seems to be pretty close to spot on. Plus I hear he's into coprophilia.)
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Dan K
September 7, 2009 9:32 PM
Maybe the Illuminati are keeping the real speech under lock and key at Area 51.
I found an Obama indoctrination transponder buried in my scalp the other day, but before I had a chance to take it to my doctor, Obama sent a couple of his Bolshevik flying monkeys to remove it at night during my sleep.
The truth is out there!
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Goshen
September 7, 2009 9:48 PM
Greer may be totally whacko, but there's another possibility.
He, and lots of others, may sound crazy, but they live in a bubble world of totally consistent beliefs. In this world, Libruls are evildoers bent on destroying the Christian nation they believe this one is.
They see things in totally black and white terms, us versus them, in absolute terms. They believe they MUST win in order to be true to their beliefs. To them, winning means utterly opposing anything and everything that is outside of their bubble world.
There are more cynical political types who prey on people like this, who use the ability to gin up outrage to drive the perception of what the middle ground is further and further to the right. They believe if they concede any point, if they engage in any compromise with progressives, that this is actually a failure.
They are trying to redefine the default, having heard for years that the majority of the country is middle-of-the road, hate that, and are on a jihad to lash us all and attack anything that seems to be edging even a bit toward the middle and away from the more extreme positions on the right.
The tipoff is -- although you don't hear one of their talking heads saying this phrase much lately -- when one of them talks about this being a 'center-right' nation. That was pretty thoroughly disproved in November, and while they don't say it as much, they haven't given up the dream to drive everyone as far to the right as possible, on any issue possible.
They're failing, generally, but I think that explains the hysterical and desperate tone of so much of the sound waves shrieking in from the right lately.
The most effective response is not equal fanaticism and absolutism on the Left. It is the calm and bemused adult composure of the Adult in Chief. He's driving them absolutely bonkers.
And he's about to come off the ropes, having given them all summer to punch themselves out, and start using the stiff left jab. He did it today in the AFL-CIO speech. There were some pretty effective punches there. Then there's the talk to the school kids. And then Wednesday night.
Something's about to change. For the better.
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jeffgee
September 8, 2009 10:39 AM in reply to Goshen
Don't forget Rupert Murdoch's media empire fanning the flames burning in the ignoramuses' heads 24/7.
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BR
September 7, 2009 10:06 PM
To summarize the collective wisdom over at another blog:
Now that the full text of Obama's speech is out and is exactly what a president should say to kids, the claim that only extreme right-wing anger about the speech ensured its non-political content reminds me of another incident: "The WMDs were moved to Syria."
The process seems to be:
A) The extreme right creates something entirely imaginary.
B) The thing is proven without doubt to have been imaginary and not at all true.
C) Seeing this, the extreme right declares victory. "We changed it before it happened!"
Why is it that mainstream news organizations still kowtow to this nonsense? Will we eventually call the media out on this forcefully? And instead of just mocking them will we be forceful? (That is, ask questions like "why are Republicans against kids staying in school and against personal responsibility, the messages of the President's speech?")
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xargaw
September 7, 2009 10:32 PM in reply to BR
The MSM kowtows because it is so much easier to just give these lunatics air time, let them spew their nonsense, then spend the rest of day elaborating on the nonsense. That way the MSM doesn't have to do any real reporting, any investigative work, hold anyone accountable. And what do we get? No valuable information, no real journalism, no responsible analysis.
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Davis_X_Machina
September 7, 2009 10:39 PM in reply to BR
The original text of the speech is in safekeeping, together with the Whitey Tape, and the original of Obama's Kenyan birth certificate, in a safe in the editorial offices of World News Daily, awaiting a world sufficiently prepared to deal with the magnitude of such shocking revelations.
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lizbensky
September 8, 2009 8:11 AM in reply to BR
"..moved to Syria"
Assuming this is true for the sake of argument, if one posing it gave it any thought they would realize how extroidinarily incompetent the Bush Admin would have been. They were sure enough about WMD's in Iraq to attack,invade and occupy sacrificing lives and national treasure. And yet, we were not able to track the evacuation of the WMD's into Syria. If that was not enough, we moved on policing Iraq without pursuing the WMD's into Syria. How about that for keeping us (and the Israelis) safe!
Of course, knowing that there never were any WMD's in the first place, made it easier for Bush Co. not to invade Syria.
What I am getting at is that the problem with much of the right's noise makers is deeper that what we see on Fox. It is a fundamental flaw in the thought process.
They stake their values on authoritative arguments and ideals, but offer no actual ideas. They enjoy a pathological attachment to doctrine and desperately fear being wrong. Evidence to the contrary can always be cast in a way that reinforces their baseless beliefs. It's very dangerous medieval thinking. And it's not the kind of thinking that would serve one well when making decisions in one's personal daily affairs. Perhaps we could do our best to point out the folly of this type of thinking with analogies and examples (say, buying a used car), but CNN is not quite ready to discuss cognitive philology and epistemology.
Meanwhile, the meter is pegged on Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit.
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Stiggs
September 8, 2009 2:59 PM in reply to lizbensky
We have invaded Syria. Not in a full scale, regime toppling sense and not for WMD's. But still.
And I'm sure that there are certainly those in and out of the administration who would have loved to see the fighting expand to include that country. I frequently site the fact that we don't have troops fighting in Iran as being all the proof I need that Obama was the far better choice. Based on McCain's (and other's) rhetoric, I suspect that Iraq was about establishing a foot hold in the middle east with the plan being to just expand from there.
Thanks, now I'm twitching again and looking for tinfoil to build another hat with (I don't know why I even bother to throw them away when I start feeling foolish about wearing them).
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henk
September 7, 2009 10:48 PM
Wow, you try to appease a wing nut, who's accused you of doing something that you are not actually doing and he uses your capitulation as proof that you were in fact doing what you were not?
Wow amazing! I bet if this happens, like a few hundred more times, Democrats might start distrusting wing nuts. Not before health care reform is done though. We are absolutely certain that the are negotiating in good faith, this time. Right Rham?
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ochreous
September 7, 2009 11:50 PM
I just had someone try to tell me that this is proof that Obama was originally trying to deliver a propaganda speech http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=108707
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Scientific
September 8, 2009 12:26 AM
Worst example of CYA ever. Dude just needed to fade away after the speech was made public.
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slb
September 8, 2009 12:40 AM
I knew that's what they would claim. That's the way it always works with these guys: If the evidence doesn't bear out their claims, then they take that as proof there has been a coverup.
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mcc
September 8, 2009 12:56 AM
It's all about delegitimizing. Obama is the president, and he's controversial.
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impik
September 8, 2009 3:29 AM
I'm sure this man has health insurance. So why isn't he use it to get some mental help?
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okwassup
September 8, 2009 5:56 AM
I for one, and tired of the double-standards involving our President. If it isn't Glenn Beck and Fox News whipping up trouble to get Van Jones out of the administration, it's conservative parents so scared the elected PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is somehow going to say something dangerous to their kids to change their thinking for life. It's gotta stop before something terrible happens. Check this out:
FROM THE ARTICLE: "Leave Our Kids Alone!"
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rambler american
September 8, 2009 7:53 AM
My neighbors were plotting to burn my house down while I slept, so I went to all their houses and spray painted "Dirty Arsonist" on all their front doors and, guess what! They backed down and my house is still standing. I still don't trust them though. I saw a couple of them talking and they kept looking at me and pointing. I think they may be up to something. I may have to take more extreme action.
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AJM
September 8, 2009 9:12 AM
Obama should sue for slander and libel. Yes, I know he's a public figure but this is ridiculous.
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jeffgee
September 8, 2009 10:44 AM
Even Laura Bush thinks the speech is good.
When is she expected to apologize to King Rush for her apostasy?
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