George W. Bush: Ensuring We're All as Dumb as He Is

A while back, I mentioned that George W. "Proud to be a C Student" Bush was trying to ensure our country's continued stupidity, despite all his braying about leaving no child behind. I'm happy to report that Reading Is Fundamental is having some success in getting their funding back. From an email they sent:

RIF’s 5th annual Dear Colleague campaign was a success thanks to the overwhelming number of supporters who asked their members of Congress to sign the letter to appropriators to save RIF’s funding. The combination of more than 45,000 e-mails, phone calls, letters, and faxes from supporters across the nation bolstered our effort to highlight RIF’s services and accomplishments throughout this year’s campaign.

A notable achievement of this year’s campaign is the increase in the number of members of Congress who signed RIF’s funding letter. This year’s impressive increase can be attributed to all who gave their time to contact their members of Congress and voice their support for RIF. This ensured that members of Congress became educated about the important work RIF does in their districts and states and made a compelling argument for saving RIF’s funding.

The battle ain't over. You can head on over to take action yourself.

It turns out that Bush isn't just attempting to keep the nation stupid (while using No Child Left Behind to con us into thinking he's a staunch supporter of early childhood education). He has other reasons for cutting RIF's funding: unlike his billion-dollar Reading First program, it doesn't line his cronies' pockets with enough government cash:

As ABC’s Justin Rood explained a while back, the Department of Education is prohibited from interfering with curriculum decisions by state and local education officials. But when it came to Reading First, Bush’s political appointees would pick favored companies, then push state and local education officials to buy their products and services.

And wouldn’t you know it, the companies favored by the administration just happened to be headed by Bush donors.

My goodness me, what a surprise. I'm as shocked by that as I am by the cloudy morning here in Seattle. Who woulda thunkit?

Carpetbagger's article is a brilliant, relentless takedown of Bush's expensive and useless pet Reading First program. Not only is it hideously corrupt and obscenely bloated, it's also just as useless as everything else Bush has gotten his grubby fingers on:

President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.

[snip]

“Reading First did not improve students’ reading comprehension,” concluded the report, which was mandated by Congress and carried out by the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. “The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level.”

All Reading First seems to have done is prove that Bush is the anti-Midas: everything he touches turns to shit. He's the anti-Robin Hood, robbing from the poor to give to the rich. And kids suffer for it right along with the rest of the nation.

Reading First came under fire last year from the Justice Department and Congress. A congressional hearing determined that "people implementing the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program made at least $1 million off textbooks and tests toward which the federal government steered states."

"That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing. "You don't get to override the law," he angrily told a panel of Reading First officials. "But the fact of the matter is that you did." Don't they always?

The whole Bush Administration has been a criminal enterprise, actually. We won't go down the whole list again, but I'll just take the opportunity to mention torture, political firings, and a war launched by lies. Now we get to add them making money off programs for kiddies. These assclowns really would steal candy from a baby.

And they're trying to steal the future right out of our schools, not to mention the brains right out of our heads.

Charming bunch of fuckwits we've got leading America, eh?