Study Islam or get an F!

By Arnold Cusmariu

Maryland is an ocean-deep blue state, having elected Obama twice.  The governor (Martin O’Malley, former mayor of Baltimore) is a Democrat with presidential ambitions; both senators (Benjamin Cardin and Barbara Mikulski) are Democrats; the eight-member congressional delegation includes only one Republican (Andrew Harris); Elijah Cummings, Steny Hoyer, and Chris Van Hollen are powerful minority members of Congress; John Sarbanes is the son of former Senator Paul Sarbanes; a Democrat, Michael E. Busch, is speaker of the House of Delegates; another Democrat, Thomas V. Miller, Jr., is president of the State Senate; the attorney general is Democrat Douglas F. Gansler.
So, it should come as no surprise that La Plata High School officials – the school is in Charles County, Hoyer’s district – would show their true colors and go into dictatorial mode if anyone dared to challenge their authority.  Having powerful Democrats “in their pocket” – as do unions around the country generally – carries enormous clout.  There’s no need to worry about accountability when the big bosses have your back.
Luckily for us, Kevin Wood is not afraid to speak his mind to the powers-that-be, which he did last month, as reported here and here.  A Marine veteran of the Iraq war and a Catholic, Mr. Wood blew his stack when his daughter, an 11^th-grade student at La Plata High School, came home with an assignment requiring her to study Islam’s five pillars or flunk the mandatory World History course teaching this material.  He received a no-trespass order banning him from school grounds after a phone conversation with Shannon Morris, the school's vice principal, during which he reportedly told her that “you could take that Muslim-loving piece of paper and shove it up your white a**.”  The order claimed that Mr. Wood “made verbal threats against the school,” which he denied was his intent.  Evidently, in Democrat-controlled Maryland, expressing outrage to a public official about matters of policy is considered a threat to an entire institution.
La Plata High School spokesperson Katie O’Malley-Simpson denied that Mr. Wood’s concerns had merit, telling Fox News: “We’re not teaching religion, we’re teaching world history.”  Mr. Wood’s wife Melissa found this response unconvincing, commenting: “My husband’s issues, and mine too, are that they’re teaching Islam, but they are not teaching the current events on Islam.”  She added: “The people do not understand what he endured when he was over in Iraq; he lost friends, and he lost brothers and sisters to these people.”
Need I mention that ISIS beheadings are probably not included in the course curriculum, certainly not viewed as consequences of “the religion of peace”?  Ignoring or downplaying inconvenient facts about Islam is the norm in academia generally, as well as among the MSM.  The Obama administration has yet to acknowledge any link between Islam and ISIS terrorists wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria (for now).
The La Plata High School fiasco reflects a disturbing fact of life in America: many parents feel they have completely lost control over what their children are taught in school and that no one is listening.  The feeling of helplessness is even more pronounced now that Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted around the country despite ample evidence that CCSS will harm students.
What is to be done?  Maryland’s seven Democrats are certain to return to Congress in January, so the Woods family is good and stuck – unless the publicity their case is gathering persuades La Plata High School officials to reconsider.  In any case, it’s clear who the real guilty party is here.  Voting Democrats out of office, not only at the federal level, is a critical step on the way to national recovery.  There’s a lot more at stake next Tuesday than whether Harry Reid gets to keep his job.

Trading Places: It's Time to Trim the Debate Moderators' Role

By Clarice Feldman

As this campaign season draws to an end, doubtless many will comment on what was right and what went wrong for each party. Let me beat the crowd by stating whatever the outcomes of the Congressional and state races the notion of Republicans continuing to allow Democratic operatives posing as newsmen and women to act as moderators in candidate debates is one of the most inexplicably stupid blunders of all. And yet each election it is repeated. Let this be the last time.
Here are some names and incidents that should be engraved forever on the RNC steps and in each republican officeholder’s quarters:  George Stephanopoulos, Gwen Ifill, Charlie Gibson, Candy Crowley, and James Pindell.
George Stephanopoulos
George, a key figure in the Clinton Administration, went on (with no journalistic experience) to become a newsie at ABC. In 2012 during one of the (too many) Republican candidate debates he surprisingly hit the candidates with a question about contraceptives -- certainly an odd issue for a presidential debate. Within weeks the Democrats launched their “War on Women”. Do you suppose this was a coincidence? Or, like me, do you think this was the first shot in a planned campaign, designed to appeal to single women which focus groups had accurately pegged as vulnerable to a campaign organized around emotional, appeals not rational, considerations?
Gwen Ifill
In 2008, this PBS correspondent, moderated the debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin without having disclosed that a book she’d authored, The Breakthrough scheduled to come out after the election, was highly complimentary to Obama and would be more saleable if he won. American Thinker’s Lee Cary detailed how biased and often uninformed her questioning was:
Here’s one of my favorite examples Cary gave:

Here's [an] Ifill bias-premised question:
"Governor and Senator, I want you both to respond to this. Secretaries of State Baker, Kissinger, Powell, they have all advocated some level of engagement with enemies. Do you think these former secretaries of state are wrong on that?"
This was a backdoor effort to support Barak Obama's "no preconditions" statement made during his nomination campaign. Ifill's bias is that there's nothing wrong with what Obama said.
Ifill knows that, diplomatically, "some level of engagement with enemies" goes on all the time, often through back channels using third parties. The idea that we don't communicate with our enemies is a Beltway media myth.
Hers was a cleverly formed question, since a "no" answer to the closed-ended query (a "yes" or "no" type question) with which it ends (Do you think...?) would sustain the notion that what Obama said is consistent with, and analogous to, what the former Secretaries of State say. Ifill uses the question to establish conceptual parity without the opportunity to challenge the premise.

Charlie Gibson
In 2008, Gibson, then with ABC news, famously implied in his questioning that Palin was ignorant of the Bush doctrine, without explaining which doctrine to which he was referring. Charles Krauthammer blasted this ill-educated entrapment noting there were over time four different “Bush doctrines”:

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.
 Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.
Not the "with us or against us" no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.
Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.
Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.
Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.
Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

Candy Crowley
Four years later CNN’s Candy Crowley gave Obama three minutes longer in the debate than she gave Mitt Romney; ignored the memo of understanding of the parties by asking follow-up questions and commenting on questions asked by the audience and the candidates’ answers, and famously and erroneously, insisting Romney was in error when he said Obama was not telling the truth when he claimed that the day after the Benghazi attack he had characterized it as “an act of terror”. As anyone who paid attention knew, both Obama and Hillary Clinton had claimed at that time it was a “spontaneous demonstration” occasioned by a video, and refused to call it terrorism.
James Pindell
This round, James Pindell is the uninformed moderator with his thumb on the scale.  He is a local reporter for WMUR (ABC) .In a debate in the hotly-contested New Hampshire senatorial race between Scott Brown and Jeanne Shaheen in which Stephanopoulos served as the chief moderator he wrongly suggested that Brown didn’t know the geography of the state. Not coincidentally, Shaheen’s main campaign thrust was that Brown was an outsider who didn’t know the state as she did. Unfortunately for Pindell, Brown was right and he was wrong. Pindell has since apologized, but it is unclear whether that is sufficient to undo the damage. Both Stephanopoulos and ABC refused to comment or add to the apologies to Brown. This time, the moderator’s intervention was so extreme (or the practice becoming so noticeable) that both NPR’s Cokie Roberts MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts publicly criticized the action.

“Having that little guy just sort of ask that same little question over and over again like that and he was just trying to be so smart, and I think he [Scott Brown] handled very it well,” Roberts said. “He didn’t go the Christie route and say ‘enough with Sullivan County.’ He said ‘no, with all due respect,’ and he didn’t get flustered by it. That was the point -- the point was to fluster him and show him as a carpetbagger. I think that is the biggest strike against him [Brown]. But it ended up being a much bigger strike against the member of my trade.”                 

In my view, the “trade’s” role   in political debates has already been sufficiently discredited -- putting their thumbs on the scale, erroneous interjections, ignoring debate rules, asking irrelevant questions and largely working to advance their own interests or those of their political friends rather than to aid the conduct of useful, honest debates.
It’s time to end this charade. Questions to candidates ought to be on point (that is, on issues within the bailiwick of their offices), accurate and neutral, set before hand, and the only moderation should be a timekeeper. TV figures should have to find another way to promote themselves, their party and their careers. Campaigns are about the candidates, not about the moderators -- time to trade places and put the candidates and voters’ interests first.