Radical right

I am so sick and tired of seeing the crass way in which the New York Times equats "homeschooling" with radical right, christian fundamentalist loonies. Huckabee Draws Support of Home-School Families is a slap on the face of the millions of parents in this country who believe that independent, child-led, out-of-school, unschooled, parent-directed education is better and far superior than the crap that passes these days as "progressive" school-confined education --regardless of religion

Yet the only people who are to blame are the leaders of the secular homeschooling movement. They have failed to raise money and to raise awareness among the progressive movement about their true politics.

First, their libertarianism has hampered the growth of the independent and even "open source" learning movement in this country because they've stuck their heads in the sand on about what they've needed to do to attack the politics and PR game of extremists like Michael Farris and his radical Home School Legal Defense Association. This guy is one of the signers of "A manifesto for a Christian America", just FYI.

Second, their natural disgust of Democrats has unfortunately marginalize them within the progressive community, even though most homeschoolers are more than liberal but progressive in their education and political thoughts and would most likely align themselves to the Democrats. But because Democrats treat them like three-eyed bible totting hill billies, they'd rather stick with the tried and true millions of the schooling industry and teacher's union than "explore" a constituency that appears anyway to be hostile to them.

There's a thread downstream featuring one of the oldest, and to me most tedious, tropes of American discourse: the fashionably cynical argument that there's no real difference between the two major parties where average folks are concerned. In normal times, this could be dismissed as a modish affectation, the kind that produces the pleasing feeling of being somehow smarter, more in tune with the Zeitgeist, so desired by those who'd like to keep at bay the tedium of making public choices; but these are not normal times. You're just not paying attention, and your argument is akin to doubting the existence of sharks because you haven't been eaten by one yet.

To put it in very stark terms: the foundations of the Republic are under attack. Simply put, while we may have seen precedents for this or that action taken by the former ruling party, we have never, in two hundred and thirty years, seen a systemic assault, on so many fronts at once, on the basic principles of American governance and the civilizational bedrock that underlies them. Once again: among people paying attention, in the academy, legislatures, the bar, business, even the church, this is not a controversial assessment; you, my friend, just haven't been paying attention. And I get impatient with it, because yours is fundamentally a lazy, solipsistic argument.

There's probably no end to the consernation at Mitt Romney's Boston headquarters; the former governor, currently seeking the republican Presidential nomination, is now confronted with a video in which he takes unacceptably, shockingly tolerant positions on choice and gay rights.

Republicans will now have to decide whether Romney is extremist enough to be their standard-bearer. Stay tuned.