Our Mr. Brooks Under the Big Top

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

20 April 14

message, on stationery from the Young Fogies Club, from Moral Hazard.

"All is well. Spring air is coming in through the backdoor by the kitchen. Out on the fire escape, I am engaged in vigorous al fresco ball-licking to pass the time. I am avoiding Master as much as I can, because I fear he may start in again about how the world he made has so come to disappoint him."

But this makes no difference when the circus comes to town. On the right, the market-share-obsessed talk-radio crowd claims that the Common Core standards represent a federal takeover of the schools. This is clearly false. This was a state-led effort, and localities preserve their control over what exactly is taught and how it is taught. Glenn Beck claims that Common Core represents "leftist indoctrination" of the young. On Fox, Elisabeth Hasselbeck cited a curriculum item that supposedly taught students that Abraham Lincoln's religion was "liberal." But, as the education analyst Michael J. Petrilli quickly demonstrated, this was some locally generated curriculum that was one of hundreds on a lesson-sharing website and it was promulgated a year before the Common Core standards even existed ... This has less to do with substance and more to do with talk-radio bombast and interest group resistance to change. The circus has come to town.

How on earth did this terrible thing happen to conservatism, and on his watch? Who was it that let these barbarians into the parlor? Where did all these clowns come from? How did things go so terribly wrong?

Yeah, it's time to trot the old girl out again.